Lord Lamont of Lerwick: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that reply. Is it not clear that the discriminatory provisions in our statute law against—to use the word of the legislation—"Papists", or the descendants of the Electors of Hanover, or elder daughters, could not possibly be judged by any court to be compatible with the Human Rights Act precisely because they are so explicit? Is not the argument that has been used previously by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor—that these provisions have only restricted application and therefore are not discriminatory— seriously weakened by recent events where the Government had to rush out a statement at the last moment, drawing on the Human Rights Act, in order to sanction a Royal marriage that otherwise would have been impossible? Would it not be more satisfactory for the Government to anticipate future events?

Lord Lester of Herne Hill: My Lords, does the Minister agree that if one were to use the Human Rights Act to repeal the discriminatory provisions clearly expressed in the Act of Settlement, it would undermine the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty? Does she further agree that it is a very curious position for Conservatives in the House to take to rely upon the Human Rights Act in the way which I think is suggested, but at the same time to suggest scrapping it, thereby leaving British citizens without British courts giving British remedies for British problems, leaving only the European Court of Human Rights—which I am sure many on the Conservative Benches would rather not hear about at all? Does the Minister agree that that is a very bizarre posture for the Conservatives to take?

Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, "bizarre" probably is the right word. As the noble Lord knows well, Parliament is not a public authority in the context of the Human Rights Act. However, I believe that the Human Rights Act is among the most important pieces of legislation that any government have introduced since the achievement of universal suffrage. It enshrines the notion of respect, equality and fairness and it protects some of the most vulnerable members of our society. I hope that all noble Lords would agree that that is of critical importance.

Lord Henley: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Lamont referred to the Government anticipating future events. When introducing the Human Rights Act, did they anticipate that it might, for example, prevent schoolteachers from having a dress code in schools; allow Travellers to ride roughshod over planning controls; or even lead to a state where the Government would effectively abolish habeas corpus?

Lord Whitty: Yes, my Lords, all those contingencies might happen. There is a relatively low probability of them happening as migratory birds do not migrate from south Asia to here. That is where the particularly virulent form of the disease—H5N1—is at present; it is much more virulent than other types. The disease could, however, be brought by migrating birds from Siberia, moving east-west, which crossed with the north-south migration. However, the probability of that happening is relatively low.
	As far as concerns humans, there is not an established widespread pattern of humans catching this strain of avian flu. However, we are looking at the information coming from Vietnam and elsewhere. The Department of Health also has a contingency plan for covering any human epidemic.

Lord Livsey of Talgarth: Will the Minister confirm that the import of poultry is banned from China specifically, because that is where the majority of the feathers, which do pose a threat, come from? It is known that the virus has crossed to humans and a number of people have died in Vietnam as a result. Will the Minister ensure that the import of feathers is banned, because there is a risk of the disease being imported into the UK?

Lord Whitty: My Lords, I could never reassure the House or my noble friend that the risk is nil. However, the combination of the bans on imports of poultry and poultry products and our contingency plans for poultry disease and for health disease give us maximum assurance that there is a low risk that the disease will get in to the country, and a very low risk that it would spread if by chance it did get in. I hope that is sufficient reassurance, even if it is not absolute.

The Earl of Sandwich: asked Her Majesty's Government:
	What steps they are taking to help restore constitutional government in Nepal.

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, however much we all want democracy to return to Nepal, does the Minister nevertheless agree that the so-called democratic government that has been removed was far from democratic in the full and genuine sense of which we would approve? The alternative of a Maoist takeover would mean an even less democratic development, and an even more remote prospect of democracy returning to that country. Does she agree that, while the actions being taken are understandable, we should at least understand also the direction in which King Gyanendra is trying to move in his efforts to establish a more stable democratic structure that can resist and defeat the Maoist rebels who would destroy the country?

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I do believe it has been right to withdraw the tranche of military assistance as a mark of our concern, not only over the dismissal of the Prime Minister, but over the King's statement on a state of emergency. We do not agree that it was necessary for the King to suspend the rights of freedom of expression, of association or to a free press; nor to force the detention of party leaders, or to increase the numbers of political prisoners. We do not think that is the right path for the King to have taken, much as we appreciate the difficulties over security.
	As I indicated, however, our ambassador has now returned, we are seeking further discussions with the King on these issues, and I hope that we will manage to find a way to help the return to democracy and security.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, Government measures to tackle sexually transmitted infections were recently set out in the public health White Paper, Choosing Health, including an additional investment of £300 million over the next three years to improve services and raise awareness across all aspects of sexual health, including syphilis. The national chlamydia screening programme already screens young men, unlike programmes in some other countries which focus solely on women.

Baroness Gardner of Parkes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for that reply. Unfortunately it is not easy to get young men to attend the screening. I understand that there is now a pilot scheme in operation, whereby they will be able to have these tests at a pharmacy. Could the Minister tell us more about that pharmacy scheme—in particular, where it is available; the cost to the patients when they present—whether they have to pay a fee on a prescription basis, or what; whether there is suitable confidentiality and anonymity; and whether the better test is used? As I understand it, 30 per cent of the EIA—enzyme immuno assay tests—have proved wrong. There is a much better test, the NAAT—the nucleic acid amplification test—which is much more reliable and is recommended to be introduced to all hospitals. Which tests are pharmacists using, and how can we encourage more young men to attend?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right—it is a very interesting development. The pilots for chlamydia screening in pharmacies were anticipated in the public health White Paper. We believe that it will be easier to reach young men in such a way, as they are quite reluctant. You cannot do opportunistic testing with young men as you can with young women, who present themselves at contraceptive clinics, for example.
	The two pilots are in London and Cornwall. The pharmacists will fit in line with the national chlamydia screening programme and young people will take the tests away. That will be free of charge. I do not know what test will be used; I suspect that it will not be the NAAT test, but I may be wrong about that, and I shall write to the noble Baroness about it. They will then return the evidence to the pharmacy and partners will be notified if necessary, and so on. The pilots will begin in the autumn and last about two years, and we shall evaluate them independently. We shall be looking in particular at the uptake of men in that respect, and I hope that the situation will become much more optimistic.

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, again, that is a very serious point. We have some good news about HIV, in so far as many people are being diagnosed earlier. But there is no doubt that we have higher figures. Prevention has to remain the cornerstone of the policy, and in the White Paper we announced the biggest media campaign for 20 years with £50 million being devoted to promote prevention with key stakeholders. It is very important to work with local community voluntary organisations in this field, with the African communities and with organisations such as the Terrence Higgins Trust. There is a lot of work going on, not least in targeting campaigns on gay men in settings where we know we can reach them. But it is a very serious problem.

Baroness Andrews: Yes, my Lords. The noble Baroness refers to the chlamydia test. There is good news about that in that we are developing a screening programme. In fact, the national screening programme that now reaches about a quarter of all primary care trusts uses the new nucleic acid testing—the NAAT test, so-called—which is more sensitive. We have invested £8 million into the conversion of laboratories so that they can use that test. In fact, every strategic health authority put in a bid, and we have been able to fund them to do that. We think probably that we shall have the full programme running by the first quarter of the next financial year, with the new test.

Baroness Neuberger: My Lords, would the Minister now agree that sexually transmitted infections of new kinds now seem to be on the increase. The example I give is one that I find really difficult to pronounce—that is, Mycoplasma genitalium, which has been called the "new chlamydia". Will the Government commission research on whether we need screening for other sexually transmitted infections beyond what we are doing at the moment?

Baroness Andrews: My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on her pronunciation. I shall try to get it right as well.
	Unlike with chlamydia, we do not know very much about the epidemiology of Mycoplasma genitalium; indeed, there is no current standard methodology for sampling the female genital tract to pick up the infection. However, we are aware of the problem, and of a study that has found some association between the disease and the pelvic inflammatory disease and also recommended that further studies were needed. So yes, we are watching the situation quite closely.

Lord Rooker: My Lords, with permission I shall repeat a Statement made in the other place regarding council tax capping by the Minister of State for Local and Regional Government. The Statement is as follows.
	"I should like to make a Statement about council tax in 2005–06, and the action that the Government propose to take in response to those local authorities which have set excessive budgets.
	"Figures released today confirm that the average council tax increase in England in 2005–06 will be 4.1 per cent. That is the lowest council tax increase in more than a decade, and the second lowest ever.
	"The reason council tax increases have come down markedly compared with previous years is two fold. First, the Government have provided another good settlement for local authorities—one which was approved on 2 February. For the third year in succession, all authorities will receive a grant increase in line with or above inflation in 2005–06. Many will receive substantially more. The average formula grant increase from Government is 5.6 per cent. Adding in specific grants to authorities takes the increase up to 6.3 per cent. We have increased funding for local government by 33 per cent in real terms since 1997; that is in stark contrast to a 7 per cent reduction in the four years up to 1997.
	"Secondly, the Government's judicious use of their capping powers has shown how seriously we view the need to protect council tax payers against excessive increases. In 2004–05, when we made it clear that we were prepared to use our reserve capping powers for the first time, the average increase in council tax dropped to 5.9 per cent from 12.9 per cent in the previous year. The 2005–06 increase has come down even further to 4.1 per cent.
	"Given our substantial investment in local government—and the scope for efficiency gains—we gave a clear message to all authorities about council tax in 2005–06. We said we expected to see an average increase of less than 5 per cent.
	"I set this out in a letter to local authority leaders on 9 December. At the same time, I informed them that we were once again prepared to use our capping powers to deal with excessive increases.
	"I later wrote to individual authorities which, despite our warnings, were reported as proposing high increases. We informed them that the 2004–05 capping principles should not be considered a benchmark for 2005–06, making clear we were prepared to take even tougher capping action than we did in 2004–05.
	"We are pleased that the vast majority of authorities have responded positively to the Government's strong message on council tax. This is borne out by the fact that we now have the lowest increase in more than a decade. I congratulate all those authorities. I know most authorities are taking seriously the need to minimise demands on their council tax payers.
	"However, there remains a small number of authorities that have set excessive budget and council tax increases. That is why I am again this year making a Statement to the House about the action we are proposing to take against authorities whose budget requirements are excessive.
	"I should like to remind honourable Members about the provisions of the capping legislation. In order to determine whether budgets are excessive, we must consider a comparison of the authority's budget requirement for 2005–06 with that of a previous year. The legislation also allows us to determine other principles, such as increases in council tax.
	"In 2004–05, we determined a range of budget and council tax principles for different categories of authority. This was in recognition of specific factors affecting these types of authority that year. I detailed the principles when I reported to the House on 29 April last year.
	"For 2005–06 we made it clear that we were prepared to take tougher capping action than last time and that the principles used for 2004–05 should not be taken as a benchmark. Our view is that authorities' 2005–06 budget requirements are excessive if they show an increase of more than 6 per cent over their 2004–05 budget; and if their council tax has increased by more than 5½ per cent over the same period. These principles have been applied to all authorities.
	"According to the principles I have described, nine authorities have set excessive budgets for 2005–06. These are Aylesbury Vale, Daventry, Hambleton, Huntingdonshire, Mid Bedfordshire, North Dorset, Runnymede, Sedgemoor and South Cambridgeshire. We are writing to these authorities today informing them of our decision to designate them with a view to capping them in year and notifying them of the maximum budget we propose to set for each of them.
	"The authorities now have 21 days in which to respond. We will carefully consider the information we have required them to send us along with any other representations they make, before we take final decisions. We can then either make an order, to be approved by Parliament, designating them at the level of the proposed maximum budget or another level; or withdraw the designation and nominate them instead.
	"Honourable Members will recall that in 2004–05 we took capping action against 14 authorities. Six were designated for capping in- year and a further eight authorities were nominated and set notional budgets for the purpose of future capping comparisons. I am pleased to say that none of the authorities against which we took capping action in 2004–05 has set an excessive budget in 2005–06.
	"This, and the fact that the average council tax increase in 2005–06 is the lowest in a decade, shows that although we have used it only reluctantly capping has been effective in restraining council tax increases.
	"We would, of course, have preferred not to use our capping powers. We would not have to take action had all authorities heeded our clear message about increases in 2005–06. However, we also have a duty to protect council tax payers from excessive increases and we will continue to do so. The actions we are taking represent a measured response.
	"If anyone thought the Government's capping action in 2004–05 was a one-off they will now surely think again. The message we are giving is loud and clear. High council tax increases are a thing of the past. The public will not tolerate excessive council tax increases either now or in years to come. And neither will the Government".
	My Lords, that completes the Statement.

Baroness Perry of Southwark: rose to call attention to pupil behaviour in schools; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, this is a topic which should attract the interest of all who care about the future of our country and the social cohesion on which it must rest. For parents, the way in which a school portrays its standards of pupil behaviour is often a determining factor in how they rate the school. From long years inspecting schools all over the country, I can affirm that one can sense the ethos of a school by the way in which pupils treat adults and each other, the way in which they conduct themselves in corridors, playground and classroom, and the image of the school which is portrayed by their behaviour beyond the boundaries of the school.
	It may be timely, in this debate, to remind ourselves why the standard of pupil behaviour is so important. First, it is because schools which score well on the criteria of pupil behaviour also score well on pupil performance and achievement. Without a well-ordered community—and behaviour which respects the purpose for which the school exists—there can be little, if any, hope of individual pupil achievement, or overall high academic and other performance for the school. This is for the obvious reason that misbehaving pupils interfere with their own and their classmates' ability to learn from their lessons, or time in quiet study areas like the library. I have seen pupils driven with frustration by the disruptive behaviour of a small group of their classmates. Such behaviour means disruption of lessons, and distraction of the teacher's attention—making it nigh impossible for those who want to learn to get anything useful out of their time spent in school.
	But it is for another and, in some ways, more disturbing reason that disruptive and negative pupil behaviour is so closely allied to poor academic performance. Where there is disruptive and anti-social behaviour, the teachers have lost the respect and authority which is the basis of successful teaching and learning. Although the organisation of schools, admissions procedures, funding and the structure of governance are all factors which either help or hinder their achievement, none of these come close to the importance of able teachers operating under good leadership, with the respect and authority they need from the wider community if they are to do their job for our children.
	Even more widely, however, disruptive and anti-social behaviour in schools is a matter which touches us all. Academic research, as well as the fascinating programme series presented by the noble Lord, Lord Winston, has clearly shown that pupils whose behaviour is unacceptable in school almost always go on to become the anti-social and even criminal members of their adult society. Unchecked and unhelped, unruly behaviour can become truly anti-society. The price we are paying for the failure of government policy towards poor behavioural standards in our schools is the breakdown of order, the culture of binge-drinking and football violence, and the disregard for others—and the law—which is endemic now across parts of our national scene.
	I feel a deep sense of sadness, therefore, at the recent Ofsted report which cites the decline in pupil behaviour in secondary schools over recent years. Inspectors found that standards could be described as "good" in only two-thirds of schools—62 per cent—falling from three-quarters—76 per cent—in 1997. That figure has never been reached again since Labour came to office.
	Behaviour in one in 10 of our secondary schools is downright "unsatisfactory", in the inspectors' view. This category includes one in five secondary schools where inspectors found that a "gang culture" was widespread, and one in two where staff felt that gang culture was a problem for them. The inspectors also found that pupils self-harm in about half of our secondary schools and even in about one-third of our primary schools. As a sad vision of what the future might be, one need only reflect on the fact that 40 per cent of schools reported that they had to deal with pupils bringing knives and other weapons into the playground or classroom—and that drug culture was "a daily challenge" for older pupils, and for those in the special referral units to which disruptive pupils are sent.
	The inspectors' report also said that children with special educational needs make up a third of the pupils who are identified as disruptive. One would think that this alone might give the Government pause in its policy of insisting that such pupils must be accepted in all secondary schools, regardless of whether the head feels that the school and its staff are equipped or trained to deal with their special problems. It is deeply disturbing to read that, last year, there were over 17,000 expulsions for violence in just one school term; that an increase of 31 per cent over the past seven years means that now, each year, over a million children play truant—and what does that say about the quality of their school experience?—and that, according to teacher unions, a teacher is assaulted on average every seven minutes.
	Alongside the inspectors' reports of schools with behaviour problems and the allied figures of growing unexplained absences—or truancy, in plain speak—are the rising numbers of school exclusions coupled with poor provision for those excluded. Excluded pupils find themselves in a pupil referral unit (PRU), where inspectors found some of the most disturbing failures of discipline and evidence of both drug abuse and violent behaviour. Urgent action is needed now to make these places a vehicle for real re-education and rehabilitation, before the pupils concerned become the gangsters and drug dealers of the adult world.
	The use of PRUs—or sin-bins, as many teachers call them—is a difficult matter for balanced professional judgment. While, of course, the child and his or her parents have a right to be heard, it cannot be right that the decision of a senior professional—the head of the school—is overruled by one in five of the appeals panels. The Government's targets, to reduce exclusions by one-third between 1997–2002, meant that more classes remained disrupted—and that more pupils who wished to learn, and teachers to teach, were unable to do so.
	Although there were positive messages in the inspectors' overall summary, and there are many wonderful schools, these are signs of a decline in the ability of teachers to do the job they and we expect them to do. I ask myself why this has happened to a school system which used to command widespread public respect. I do not blame the teachers. It is my profound conviction that we are now reaping the alarming harvest of the Government's policies in recent years. Naming and shaming schools, a constant barrage of statements about bad teachers and failing schools—coupled with a stream of directives, targets and regulations—have destroyed the morale and professionalism of much of the teaching profession and undermined public trust in what they are doing.
	The relationship between teacher and taught is a delicate and fragile one: but it is an essential part of what makes for successful learning, leading to high achievement. Governments have no place in coming between teacher and pupil in the way we have seen in recent years. Politicians have a legitimate right to determine the overall goals of education on behalf of the society they represent. They also have a duty to ensure that schools have the necessary people, rightly trained, and the tools to do their job well. But politicians and government have no place in the detailed professional judgment of how these goals should be achieved.
	I well remember and often reflect on something I heard the former Swedish Minister of education, presiding over one of Europe's most successful education systems, say some years ago. He asserted that the core of his policy was, "We trust the teachers". To that I say amen!
	In contrast, this is a government who believed they could not trust teachers. They believe, for example, in telling them how literacy and numeracy should be taught minute by minute. I have been an observer in the class of a highly able teacher struggling against her better judgment to follow the government diktat about how the literacy hour should go. In the process, she had to silence the curiosity of one of her pupils; end a stimulating exchange with others just as they were becoming engaged; and stop herself almost in mid-sentence as she was explaining a point from the text, all because the rules said that after so many minutes the class should "move on" to the next predetermined activity.
	Was such interference justified? It might be a high price to pay if, indeed, we had improved matters. Well, all we now know is that since the literacy hour was introduced in 1998, almost 1.2 million children have left their primary schools with poor literacy skills. And this is even if we believe the Government's claim to have raised the level 4 base performance from 65 per cent to 75 per cent—although that is disputed by many experts.
	Literacy is too important for anyone to play political games. A researcher at the US Department of Justice recently said,
	"In a school setting, reading failure meets all the requirements for bringing about and maintaining the frustration level that frequently leads to delinquency".
	In other words, the link between poor literacy skills and delinquent behaviour is all too direct and clear. As one tearful British nine year-old who had fallen behind in reading put it, "Reading affects everything you do".
	This is only one example of how the Government's habit of trying to interfere in the details of classroom management has failed. There are many more. A barrage of targets has distorted the work schools were doing. Those in difficult areas with intake from homes where standards of education are low and parental attitudes towards schools are suspicious if not hostile, have a very different challenge from those in leafy suburbs where children enter school with a readiness to learn and an instinctive respect for teachers. Yet targets too often denigrated the first and downgraded the expectations of the other in a mistaken attempt to bring all to a common denominator of achievement on target.
	This is such nonsense one wonders why the Government remain so wedded to targets. Yet the Prime Minister recently claimed on television that targets are his way of demonstrating to the public that they are getting value for money. I would say, "Only if the targets are the right ones, adapted to the very different circumstances of individual schools, not to some Whitehall-imposed norm which fits no-one".
	I return to the issue which I believe is central to this problem; that is, the authority of teachers. Their skill, the relationships they are able to establish with their pupils, and the stimulus and absorbing interest of what they teach is the only real answer to the problem of disruptive pupils. Time and again in schools which have been taken over for reform, that is the only magic formula which they have found to exist.
	The naming and shaming of schools—the public designation of a "failing" school—has, I am convinced, played a major role in undermining the authority of teachers with their pupils and with society, and on that authority the delicate balance of school success is based. If pupils feel that the society around them, from politicians, to newspapers to general public opinion has no respect for teachers, it is not a big step to suppose as young as eight or nine that you too have no call to respect your teacher or your school. I often wonder whether the Government have reflected on what it means to teacher pupil relationships to be in a school which is publicly declared to have failed.
	In the light of this slow erosion of status and therefore their morale and professionalism, it is not surprising to find that the number of teachers leaving the profession has nearly doubled since Labour came to power. Sadly, it is often the best-qualified, who can easily find themselves better paid and more valued in other professional roles, who have left the classroom with relief. The burden on heads, and the low status with maximum risk of public shaming, would deter many of us from taking on the role of a school head in any inner-city school today. It is therefore also not surprising that last year we saw headships being re-advertised again and again, not least in London schools where over 300 headships had to be re-advertised a least once.
	This is not a situation which can be allowed to deteriorate further. Teachers must be able to assert their authority and exercise their professionalism again. Restoring autonomy to schools and giving heads real power to run them according to their understanding and knowledge of their own staff, pupils and community must be the only right way ahead.
	I have always believed that education, because of its long time-scale, should strive for consensus in politics rather than confrontation. It is therefore with some reluctance that I end with my indictment of this new Labour Government's policies and practices in education over the past eight years. It has undermined the authority of teachers, surrounded them with red tape, paperwork and regulation, distorted their work with targets, come—fatally—between their professionalism and their pupils, and in so doing lowered their morale in ways which have lost many of the most able from the profession entirely.
	As one who believes in teachers and their dedication to their job, I can but hope that soon we will see a government who, quite simply, allow teachers to teach, and take pride in what they are doing. I beg to move for Papers.

Lord McKenzie of Luton: My Lords, I begin by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for securing this debate on a matter that has featured in a number of our recent deliberations: namely, the Education Bill; 14-to-19 issues, which we discussed just a week ago; and even the School Transport Bill. It is certainly topical.
	It is, however, vitally important that we see the matter in context. As the Ofsted report, Managing Challenging Behaviour, makes clear, the great majority of children and young people enjoy learning, work hard and behave well. They are also reaching higher levels of attainment year by year. I know that it is important that we concentrate on what needs to change, which typically means the problem areas, but we should never forget to praise all the good things that are happening in education and the commitment of so many young people to succeed.
	We should also acknowledge that from Ofsted inspections since 1996–97, behaviour in our primary schools has gradually improved, with 90 per cent of schools inspected experiencing behaviour which is judged to be good or better. This is to be welcomed.
	However, we know that for secondary schools the reverse is the case and there are challenges to meet. Part of the problem in analysing the behaviour issue is one of definition. But according to Ofsted, the most common form of poor behaviour in schools continues to be lowish levels of disruption of lessons and aggressive behaviour, either verbal of physical. It affects not only the individual concerned, but those who want to make progress with their education and it can sap the morale of teachers.
	The Ofsted recommendations for how the challenges might be met are not particularly surprising. The best LEAs and schools are well advanced with a range of strategies to meet these challenges. There is a parallel with what must be done to raise levels of attainment. As I think I mentioned in a previous debate, I chair our local lifelong learning scrutiny committee. It deliberated on what made a difference in attainment, and there are parallels in dealing with challenging behaviour. We came to the unremarkable conclusion that there was no single nugget which made the difference. A range of things need to be done consistently and done consistently well.
	Leadership in schools is one of them. I am sure that most noble Lords here today would be able to cite examples of where the performance of a school has been changed for the better by a charismatic head teacher with a strong management team and also to cite examples where the reverse is the case.
	Good leadership has many facets, part of which is ensuring that there are clear policies to tackle bad behaviour and that these are consistently applied. But I believe that the best leaders of schools are those who develop an ethos which values learning and raises the aspirations of every pupil. There are lots of excellent examples up and down the country, and I can cite some from my own community where this is happening. We should not denigrate what is happening in our schools and the progress that teachers are making.
	Good teaching makes a difference, of course, and Ofsted draws attention to the fact that children who behave badly in some lessons do not in others. I wonder, however, whether we do enough to address the learning as well as the teaching. I have always assumed that good teaching would automatically encompass an understanding of different learning styles, with lessons planned to address these. From some work that we have done locally, I wonder whether that is universally the case and whether there is a settled consensus among educational professionals on the matter.
	The Tomlinson report, and the Government's response which we debated last week, was in part about broadening the curriculum and offering all young people a learning experience with which they can engage. It is clearly going to help address some bad behaviour issues. For youngsters from some ethnic minority communities there are issues about identifying good role models, and the imperative to make the composition of the teaching staff of any school more reflective of the local community as a whole.
	Consistency of approach in responding to bad behaviour in schools is acknowledged as being part of the strategy to improve outcomes. This is clearly easier in schools which have a low turnover of staff and good retention policies. LEAs have a strong role to play in helping schools develop good retention and recruitment policies. At a national level, the significant increases in funding and the additional recruitment and training of teachers which has taken place under this new Labour Government, is an essential prerequisite of rolling back the scourge of bad behaviour in our schools.
	If we want young people to value education, we need to give them the chance to learn in good quality buildings with state-of-the-art equipment. If their learning environment is run down and shabby, it sends the wrong messages about the value that society places on their education. If we are careless about their schools, why should they be different? That is why investment, which is going into the rebuilding and refurbishment of our schools up and down the country, is so vital. Building schools for the future, and budget measures for the primary sector, will help to change the face of hundreds of schools up and down the country.
	One of the Ofsted findings was that behaviour is significantly better in settings which have a strong sense of community and where schools work closely with parents. That is self-evident, but I believe that it is of particular relevance in early years. Our local experience involved a Flying Start programme, where family workers and family rooms were developed in infant schools, initially those in the most deprived areas of the town. The programme provided support for families via the school, and especially for communities where English was not the first language spoken at home. Support via the school was more welcome than more direct support from social services, which some saw as having a stigma attached.
	The outcome of this engagement was very positive, with improving attendance, higher achievement, better behaviour, and with the bonus of an unintended spur to adult education take-up by parents. The family worker was typically a woman, engaging mostly with mothers, but I was at a school just this morning which had successfully bid for Early Years funding to employ somebody to work specifically with fathers.
	Engagement with parents and fostering an educational community is easier in early years. What remains a very big challenge is to get that engagement with some families of young people in the secondary education sector, particularly if the parents themselves have lost out on their schooling. As a governor of a local secondary school I have found it incredibly dispiriting when sitting on a sub-committee reviewing fixed-term exclusions and, time and time again, seeing no parent appear to support their children. We should not underestimate the very difficult family circumstances in which a minority of children still live.
	I think that the biggest challenge concerning behaviour is to engage with those communities and the families within them who are the most deprived. That is not just a task for schools or for LEAs. Some of these communities have been scarred by poverty and the under-investment of the past. They are the areas that have historically experienced that accumulation of disadvantage, including poor housing, high unemployment, the greatest health inequalities and the highest crime. We are still living with the legacy of those who would have us believe that there is no such thing as society or community.
	Targeted approaches to regeneration are, however, beginning to turn the tide—certainly for us locally. A combination of programmes and investment, including Sure Start, the New Deal for Communities, the Single Regeneration Budget and Neighbourhood Renewal Funding, as well as European monies, are uplifting these pockets of erstwhile deprivation. Improvement in the economy and anti-poverty strategies are making life easier for families. Of itself, this will not automatically bring the reconnect with the value of education, but it is part of seeking to ensure that all communities and all families have a stake in the future.
	Although there are challenges for the issue of behaviour, and we should not underestimate them, I remain optimistic about the future. Much of what the Government have done—the investment that is flowing into our schools—is making a real difference. There are issues about turning back some of the selfish attitudes that sprung from policies which were in place before this Government took office. It takes a while to turn that back and reconnect people with communities, particularly with education. We are set fair, however, to achieve the improvement that we want for the benefit of every pupil in our schools.

Baroness Walmsley: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry of Southwark, for initiating this important debate. She knows, as we all do, that the behaviour of children in school can get in the way, not only of their own educational achievement, but that of other pupils. It is for all their sakes that we need to address the matter effectively. However, it is not enough to address the symptoms unless we also address the causes of bad behaviour. In that way we can reduce the need to find solutions.
	First, I would like to say a few words from my own experience as a secondary teacher in a boys' comprehensive school. Luckily for me, it was quite a good school in a rural town, where the levels of deprivation were not extreme and the support provided by senior staff was good. I soon discovered which factors caused boys to behave badly and disrupt lessons. It is commonly accepted among teachers that windy days are a problem. Children coming into a lesson after 15 minutes in a windy playground are very stimulated and take a while to settle down. Then there is the Friday afternoon factor, when children suffer the same "Let's get to the weekend" syndrome as we all face. Similarly, anticipation of holidays when we get to the end of term is a feeling with which your Lordships can no doubt sympathise today.
	However, these are minor factors. I soon discovered that the boys became restless when my lessons were not as absolutely riveting as usual, and I learned to be creative about presenting curriculum material that might otherwise be boring in as interesting a way as possible. Distracting behaviour is often a symptom of disengagement from the work in hand.
	That is why I believe that one of the major causes of the problems we face today is inappropriate curriculum. I will come back to that in a minute. First, it is important to say that we must not fall into the trap of over-estimating the scale of the problem. A recent report from Ofsted, Managing challenging behaviour—which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, has mentioned—has made it clear that behaviour was good or better in 90 per cent of primary schools, 68 per cent of secondary schools and 80 per cent of special schools and pupil referral units, where the most difficult children go. Most disruption is at a low level, with serious incidents—particularly those of a violent nature—being rare. Most schools manage their pupils' behaviour very well, sometimes in the face of serious disadvantage.
	Most young people are well behaved and considerate, and prefer a classroom environment in which they have good teaching and a calm atmosphere. I always believe in listening to children themselves. The Ofsted report had some very telling comments from them. They describe good teachers as being those who respect pupils, offer interesting activities and make learning fun. These are the teachers who set clear boundaries and consequently have less problem with disruption.
	However, to develop into such a teacher, a young teacher needs ongoing professional development in classroom management and understanding adolescent development. He or she needs clear leadership from the senior management of the school. It is not good enough to put young teachers into a classroom environment that they are not equipped to manage. It is not fair to them or their pupils. The same goes for supply teachers, who often have even greater difficulties because they do not know the pupils.
	One of the other recommendations of the Ofsted report was the need for an appropriate curriculum. That is why we support the need for full implementation of the Tomlinson report on 14 to 19 education and the development of a framework of vocational skills and work-based learning programmes, along with academic courses, for all those who want them. These should be on a unit-based system, which can be so motivating for less able pupils.
	Some schools have already used the extra money available through the Government's behaviour improvement programme to establish alternative curriculum schemes for difficult pupils for whom the academic route is an appropriate. I read about the Activate programme in Slough, in association with the local company, Sara Lee, which works well as part of fulfilling the authority's aspiration to achieve zero school exclusions. Pupils are sent to a training centre at the company's headquarters and carry out a work-related curriculum and are helped to secure work placements and obtain vocational qualifications.
	There are many other such programmes and the behaviour improvement programme has had many successes. However, not all schools have access to the funds and I hope that the Minister will tell us today that the Government intend to put some of the extra investment in schools announced by the Chancellor last week into expanding that sort of important programme.
	Ofsted also established that a significant proportion of pupils with difficult behaviour have special educational needs and/or face disadvantage and disturbance in their family lives. That is why it is so important to assess the child's needs as early as possible so that appropriate early intervention can occur. Good quality nursery education and care, carried out by qualified teachers who understand child development and can properly interpret child behaviour, is crucial to that.
	Investment in the early years can save a lot of problems later. That is why we on these Benches believe that the money now being put into the child trust funds would be better spent reducing class sizes up to key stage 1 to no more than 20. We would also invest the necessary resources to reduce class sizes at key stage 2 to no more than 25. It is particularly at this early stage that children need individual attention so that problems can be dealt with and they can learn to read. Ofsted's and other studies have shown that poor literacy and bad communications skills are a common factor among those who behave badly.
	Secondary schools that have good links with their feeder primary schools tend to do better on pupil behaviour, as do those that have good links with parents. Kidbrooke School in Greenwich used its behaviour improvement programme funds to finance a counselling service that provides one-to-one support for pupils and their families, group working and family therapy. It also runs a helpline for parents dealing with crises such as self-harm, drugs and crime. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children provides similar services in some schools as part of its "Someone to turn to" campaign and recommends that counselling services should be available in all schools, especially in the absence of adequate adolescent mental health services in some areas.
	Another common cause of bad behaviour has recently been highlighted in a TV programme that has received a lot of attention in other media. Jamie Oliver's programme on the quality of school dinners has highlighted what many of us have known for years: school dinners do not only affect children's short and long-term health, they also affect their behaviour. Large amounts of artificial sweeteners, preservatives and colorants can cause hyper-activity in children. Raised blood glucose caused by eating a lot of sweets and chocolates causes a burst of activity followed by a period of lethargy, none of which contribute to good school discipline and effective learning. I would encourage schools to remove vending machines that sell sweets, chocolate and fizzy drinks and replace them with fruit, healthy snacks and access to our good clean tap water.
	I must say that I have been disappointed by the Government's reaction to Jamie Oliver's campaign. Setting up a trust to provide parents with advice about how to get better school dinners is a sticking plaster, and not a very effective one at that. Parents already have good advice. They can get it from Jamie Oliver. What they really need is investment in school kitchens so that the catering staff have the space, time and equipment to cook real food and the provision of more than 37 pence per meal, so that better quality ingredients can be bought.
	An amount of 50 or 60 pence has been suggested. I don't think that your Lordships would accept a meal—which could be the main meal of the day or the only cooked meal that many children get—if the cost of the ingredients was only 37 pence. If it is not good for your Lordships it is certainly not good enough for a growing child. Can the Minister confirm that the recently announced primary school building programme will include kitchens that are adequate for proper cooking of proper food?
	I do not wish to sound negative, but we must accept that, whatever we do to prevent it, there will always be some disruptive behaviour in schools. It is a matter of hormones—especially that powerful drug testosterone, the effects of which became so familiar to me when teaching boys in a secondary school. That is why we need effective remedies and support for schools. Many schools have good internal referral units that provide smaller groups with well-trained teachers who have time to spend understanding the problems of the pupils and helping them to achieve and eventually go back into the mainstream. It was notable how much this sort of attention was appreciated by the pupils to whom the Ofsted inspectors talked during the compilation of the report I referred to earlier.
	However, some schools are not well enough resourced to deal in that way with all the pupils who need this type of help and there is a great need for more financial support. Some education authorities have supported their behaviour education support team with behaviour improvement programme money to help them use multi-agency links to assist schools. Liverpool teams now include workers from the adolescent mental health services to provide expert help in tackling poor behaviour caused by mental health problems. Ofsted praised this work when it evaluated the authority. My noble friend Lady Sharp may have more to say about mental health later.
	However, there are occasions when all else has failed and the school wants to exclude a child. Here the key is to achieve the right balance between the needs and welfare of the child concerned and those of all the other pupils of the school. It is vital that the child should receive appropriate information about the process and be allowed to speak for himself at any hearing if he wants to. As the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, said, it is not good enough to rely on the parents to speak for the child, because sometimes they are unable or unwilling to do so.
	Managed transfer to alternative full-time education is essential. Excluding a child from a school does not exclude him from his community. It is sometimes seen as an unexpected holiday and the child hangs around the school gates causing almost as much trouble as he caused when he was in the school, so proper provision is vital. It is also vital because of what he might get up to while he is out of school. In his latest annual report, David Bell, the Chief Inspector of Schools, said that most children in youth offending institutions have been failed by the education system. And yet the Forum on Prisoner Education pointed out in its evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee for its report due out next week, that the spend per head on an under-18 in a young offender institution is only £3,000 per year, whereas the spend per head on the education of a child in public care is £31,000. It is a lottery.
	LEAs need the resources to provide support to the school and be involved in behaviour programmes right from the start, before the problems become severe. As the Ofsted report stated:
	"Schools and other settings can be expected to solve most behaviour problems themselves but they cannot solve them all. They need specialist support from other services".
	Unless the schools themselves have rigorous self-evaluation systems to monitor their own performance and the LEAs also monitor the problems and the efficacy of the proposed solutions, nothing will ever be achieved.
	I look forward to hearing from the Minister how the Government propose to address that important problem.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I very much agree with what was said by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, with regard to how many different things need to be done to improve behaviour in schools. It is not something which admits an easy solution—there are a lot of little things which can be done, a lot of improvements and initiatives which contribute.
	I hope that we can evolve a mechanism for spreading good practice around the school system. It is something that the Government have tried—in the case of Beacon schools—and then scrapped it a few years later. I am not aware that there is anything effective. Spreading good practice has always somehow seemed to be a difficult thing to achieve. In a situation which is so much a matter of experience and learning how it is done from other teachers, to introduce an effective mechanism along those lines would be something quite useful that the DfES could do.
	I very much agree with both the noble Lords on the importance of curriculum. It is something I have banged on about for a long time. Our basic curriculum is of total irrelevance to many children who are expecting to end their formal academic education at 16. Even in key areas such as the mathematics they are not learning things that they will need later. In many areas where their interest and imagination ought to be engaged, the curriculum has become dry and uninteresting and some sort of preparation for an imagined later academic life. We must recognise the damage it does and spend a lot of time sorting it out.
	I entirely agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said about Jamie Oliver. Yes, let us catch that particular tide at the flood and push on to something that really would improve the whole national life. If kids came out of school expecting good food, we would suddenly find it possible to get good food when looking for a bite around the backstreets of London. But I do not know that the average meal of two sausages and baked beans in the Apsley room costs more than 37 pence. I suspect that the ingredient costs on that are pretty limited. It certainly induces lethargy.
	I do not want to dwell too much on those areas as they have been well covered. The only further thing I would like to say is that I disagree entirely with the idea of spending money on reducing class sizes. To say so many sensible things and then to go for that hoary old chestnut when all the evidence shows that that is an extremely ineffective way of spending money seems to be sad.
	We are becoming much better at accepting evidence of what works in education. There have been some big studies by Ofsted—for example, the Tennessee STAR project—which have demonstrated just how ineffective reducing class sizes is, even in the early years. Although it is sensible to keep a limit on these things, just from the point of view of managing the class, it really is not sensible to spend an extra 50 per cent of funds cutting class sizes from 30 to 20. There are so many better ways in which that money could be spent.
	I wanted to pick up one of the points that my noble friend Lady Perry made about not micromanaging. Let us look at how we can deal with the consequences of bad discipline in schools without trying to produce mechanisms that interfere with the decisions that they make. Let us see if we can allow schools to run themselves and judge for themselves what is best for their pupils as a whole, for the badly behaved pupil in particular and for the running of the school. That is fundamentally the best way for things to happen. There are a lot of things which need to be said about that, and I will come to it.
	Another thing I particularly wanted to pick up on was—going back to earlier debates—the Minister's vision of a local education authority as being there as a friend and support and adviser of parents and in this case, pupils and what would need to be done to make the system work in that sort of way. If we allow schools effectively to get rid of pupils as they wish, there will be consequences on the system outside. There should therefore be consequences on the schools if they choose to take that route.
	Schools will have different views on when they should expel a pupil. I know one secondary state school where you can get chucked out for being caught smoking within a mile of the school. I know others where you have to go to extreme lengths to get chucked out and the head will proudly say that despite persistent bad behaviour they have managed never to chuck a child out. I think that these differences between schools are important. They ought to reflect the way parents think the school should be run and the way the community thinks that particular school should be run.
	Getting rid of a child should carry with it responsibilities and obligations. My immediate view as to how to deal with that is that the school should lose double or maybe triple the funding for a child that it expels. That is the sort of cost that is going to be incurred elsewhere in the system if they do it. There ought to be a real incentive to do what they can before they get rid of a child. But if someone is really disrupting the learning of other people and the school has come to the end of its own resources in dealing with that then they should be able to take that decision relatively untrammelled. After all, if a school cannot cope with a pupil then that really is not the right place for the pupil to be.
	As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley said, a lot of these kids who get into trouble have SEN. There has always been the argument that it should be the school that is doing better at handling children with SEN. I entirely agree. But if the school cannot, or if it has not yet learnt how to deal with inclusion properly and it if its headmaster is one of quite a large number of dinosaurs where SEN is concerned, then that kid would be better off elsewhere. The school is going to take some while to change and why should the child have to suffer that merely out of some matter of distorted principle? The child would be better off elsewhere.
	The other side of the coin is that once a child has left a school under compulsion it is enormously in the interests of society that that child is extremely well catered for. If we do not make that a positive experience for the child, we can expect a lot of trouble from the adult later on. The focus must come onto what PRUs do and how well they do it.
	I would like to see the financial arrangements for local authorities really focused on them running a good PRU system. A start will be the fact that it will carry double funding, which will come from the schools that have expelled the pupils. I would also like to see government support for PRUs that are well run. So if a PRU gets a good Ofsted report it should receive a substantial supplement in its funding. That would encourage local authorities to make sure that their PRUs come up to scratch.
	The best thing about an Ofsted report is that it is a good broad measure where you are not having to live with a succession of targets, but the school is being looked at as a whole. If there was a reasonably regular system of Ofsted reports for PRUs then a 50 per cent uplift in funding, or perhaps more than that, could be based on the results of the Ofsted report. First, this would give LEAs an incentive to run them well. Secondly, the combination of that and the funding stream from schools would mean an absence of the perverse incentive that exists at present, where PRUs are expensive and therefore LEAs are desperate not to see pupils excluded.
	LEAs are therefore not acting in the best interests of children because running PRUs well is a very expensive business. If they are established as well funded entities in the first place then it will be possible to turn them into something that is much more like the model which the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, has expressed himself in favour of.
	When the PRU turned a kid round we would want it to be able to place that child in whatever school was decided to be right. Although schools would be allowed to expel a child when necessary they would also be encouraged to take children out of the PRU system so that they could be recycled effectively. Something along those lines has a chance of working well. We are not that far away from it.
	Our troubles are the result of misplaced attempts to stop schools getting rid of pupils they cannot handle, which harm not only the pupil concerned but also the rest of the school. A system of perverse incentives on PRUs has resulted in their being not generally as good as they should be.
	It might be sensible to privatise PRUs or at least to put out to tender, as has been done with some prisons. We might find appropriate systems in the private sector; they certainly exist. When your kids get kicked out of some posh public school for being found with a packet of cannabis in their back pocket, there are places that specialise in picking them up. Those schools do not advertise themselves as such but they are good at it. There is a lot of experience in the private sector of running such institutions. It might be sensible to look at the issue alongside the model of putting some prisons into the private sector.
	I am not despondent about the state of discipline in schools but we must keep things moving on all fronts. Most particularly, we must understand that trying to force things on schools and to run things by diktat from the centre will always produce the wrong results for children and schools.

Lord Dearing: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for introducing the subject, and other noble Lords for the contribution that they have already made to my understanding of the issue.
	Perhaps it is fitting that I should begin by acknowledging the commitment that the Government have shown. As I recall, hundreds of millions of pounds have been devoted to the improvement of behaviour in schools. I welcome especially their firm three-year commitment of funding to schools so that they can plan continuing programmes to address problems of behaviour management and meet the requirements of children with special educational needs.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, referred to Ofsted reports and the problems that we still have. However, Ofsted, in its latest report, said that the Government's behaviour improvement programme is proving effective in the large majority of schools in which it has been applied. But all of us would say that, however much commitment and progress there have been, there is still a major problem.
	I want to offer four thoughts on possible lines of action. Noble Lords who debated the recent Education Bill had a good deal to say from time to time on behaviour. One of our scores was on the section of the Bill dealing with the Training and Development Agency for Schools. It enjoins the agency to have regard in particular to the desirability of securing that the school workforce is well fitted and trained to promote a number of things. Our score was to get "behaviour" on to that list. I shall quote the full list:
	"to promote the spiritual, moral, behavioural, social, cultural, mental and physical development of children".
	I shall deal first with behavioural development in the context of the agency. My impression is that the PGCE syllabus is heavily congested. It would be in the interests of schools and nascent teachers if, in responding to the Bill, more attention was given to the development of students' understanding and capability of dealing with behaviour in the classroom.
	The second element of our list of aspects to which the agency is mandated to give particular attention is the physical development of children. Reference has been made twice to Mr Jamie Oliver, that heroic phenomenon who is penetrating school dining rooms and kitchens—all praise to him. Just before I came to the Chamber, I met two beautifully dressed young women of primary school age. When I addressed the subject of schools, the name that brought them to life was Jamie Oliver's. I am not sure whether any of our names would provoke such a response. They knew all about him—good luck to him, for the sake of our children.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to the 37p cost of a school meal. The Times has reported that the Scottish Executive proposes to spend an extra £63.5 million on school meals over the next three years. Maybe there is scope for the extra 13p proposed by the noble Baroness in our schools. It does not sound a lot.
	The noble Baroness referred to the nexus between what we ingest and how we behave. The Times nutritionist, Jane Clarke, said:
	"Changing the food we eat has an enormous impact on how we behave and live, but its effect is even greater on children. Numerous studies have uncovered strong links between additives and preservatives in junk food and hyperactivity".
	I am therefore grateful to notice in the Secretary of State's recent remarks and in other things coming from the Government that the issue will be addressed. The Secretary of State's ambition is to raise the bar against which standards of school meals are measured. I understand that the Government intend to come forward with proposals. Those are very relevant to what goes on in the classroom, especially after lunch.
	I want to trespass into two areas, one of which is strange country for me: the cultural and social development of children, which is dealt with in the Bill. We in this country, and perhaps in the United States, seem to have concentrated on the concept of the individual; selfishness, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie; the self; and the individual's rights and development. The issue of respect, which is so important in the classroom, has become a pejorative term that is read as "subservience" and is not an okay word. However, in other countries, including Japan, there is less acute emphasis on the individual and more on the individual's responsibility to the group and contributing to the well-being of the class and the education of members of your group. Perhaps the fact that we have developed a culture of self-interest rather than group responsibility has been part of the genesis of the problem.
	I remember listening to Peter Ustinov, shortly after he had been made chancellor of the University of Durham, addressing the rectors of the universities of Europe. He said: "In this cathedral of Durham, you Christians talk a lot about love. I would like to talk about respect". His speech was devoted to the value of respect.
	When I went on an exploratory visit to a school, where I chatted to pupils and teachers, I was impressed to hear more than once from pupils and staff, "This is a happy school. We care about each other". Those words, like Peter Ustinov's, have remained in my memory.
	Citizenship is now part of the school curriculum. Perhaps it would make sense, in developing citizenship as part of the curriculum, to begin by talking about what it is to be a good school citizen and to contribute to the life of the school, which is a community. It is a small community but teaching pupils how to be effective and to contribute to it is a realistic way of introducing a subject that might otherwise seem remote.
	With some anxiety, being in the presence of the right reverend Prelate, I refer to the second great commandment. Perhaps one might approach RE in schools with the dictum, "We care for each other", because it is about loving each other.
	It is a cultural issue. While you cannot import foreign culture—say, Japanese culture—it is worth researching other cultures and their impact on behaviour to see whether there are elements that we can take on board when considering how to introduce some of the thinking, caring and respect for others on which civilisation is based.
	My last point concerns the transition from primary to secondary school. If a child by the age of 11 or 12 is well behind, there is a serious risk that when that child goes to secondary school he or she will be lost. The child will regress, having left the security of a small school and the class teacher. It is difficult for children to go into a strange large establishment without the class teacher who knows them intimately and to face the many other kids who are older than themselves.
	I am worried that such children often regress, and as they do so, their behaviour deteriorates. They are frustrated because they are not succeeding, and they express that through their behaviour. The behaviour established in school reflects all later behaviour in life, such as attendance, bullying and a disregard for others.
	We must anticipate problems by investing in those children before they leave primary school. Perhaps they should stay on an extra year, or perhaps that is an outrageous suggestion. We ought to invest in them to give them a better chance of making a successful transition. When they have gone to secondary school, should we not make sure that we help them at that stage? We are prepared to invest in our ablest young people through their university life. For all our sakes, and for the well-being of society, we need to invest in those children to help them to come on board in language and arithmetic so that they can engage.
	I was talking to one of my neighbours whom I respect. She talked about her own child 40 years ago and how in a sixth form entry school there were two forms—one for those who were the least successful, who had their old primary school teacher to relate to and help them. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said that smaller classes are not the idea, and the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, was nodding. I shall not push for one solution or another, but we need resources to help the children in secondary schools who are in danger of losing out for life. We have a terribly important responsibility to those children.
	We should invest in the PGCE course on behaviour. All praise to Jamie Oliver. May the Government find an extra few pence, as the Scots have done. We should think about the cultural issue and research it. Above all, we should think of the kids who are losing out, especially as they move from primary to secondary school. We should give them a real second chance.

Lord Elton: My Lords, we are all in the debt of my noble friend for staging the debate, if only for the speech that we have just heard.
	The noble Lord, Lord Dearing, said some exceedingly important things, which I suspect go beyond our brief this afternoon, although they overlap it very powerfully. It needs to be heard by more people than the Minister and his Whip, and indeed by more people than the Government. He addressed the question of the sea change that has taken place in this country since the last war. I doubt whether I would advocate research into other cultures. He suggested as the distillation of what is needed the second great commandment, which is:
	"Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself".
	That has been embedded in our culture for 1,300 years, and it is what we are losing. We need to investigate ourselves to find out why we are losing it. Then we come to the question of respect—or responsibilities, as I put it. Children often learn from their parents what their rights are, which is not new.
	I taught for a number of years in a secondary comprehensive school with 1,500 children in a slum-clearance estate in Nottingham. I remember one youth getting a bad report from his teacher because he had not done his homework. When I asked why not, he said, "Well, my father is back". When I asked where from, he said, "He's a merchant seaman and he's been away for three months". I said that, of course, he should give him a welcome back, but I got the same excuse the next day and the next. When I asked what was going on, he said, "My dad won't let me work out of hours". That seaman actually came and took his coat off to the house tutor and threatened to punch him because he expected his son to work overtime without pay. There is a long-running culture of rights in this country.
	However, I digress. I apologise if my speech seems somewhat fragmented. It was to have been pulled together this morning in the quiet hours between breakfast and lunch, but unfortunately a dramatic domestic emergency resulted in me working as a plumber's mate from 9.15 until one o'clock. I therefore have to pull it together as I go.
	The first requirement of improving children's behaviour in school is to have them in school. It worries me that the Motion does not embrace the children who are not in school. The Minister will properly give figures on the reduction in truancy and he will talk about the Five Year Strategy and the deployment of truancy sweeps, which have been going on for the past 20 years, as a means of combating truancy. But they look for children who are on school rolls.
	In the short time I have had to prepare, I managed to meet a couple of school-aged children on Saturday who are not on any school roll. One was given a dispensation last November. The child has a doctor's certificate saying that the violence in the school induced unacceptable stress levels so his patient should be excused. That has not been followed up by any other provision. The other child has not got on to any school roll since his transition from primary to secondary age. The reason given by this boy was that his brother created such mayhem in all the schools in the district that as soon as his name was seen, the school declared itself full.
	That is anecdotal. But the description in the Evening Standard yesterday of what is going on in some streets in Brixton makes one wonder how many kids are outside the system altogether. They are not known about or counted in the statistics. I hope that the Minister will take that thought away and consider what surveys can be carried out to correlate the known number of children of school age revealed in the census with the known number who actually receive full-time education.
	I turn to the DfES report on the "Five Year Strategy for Children and Learners", which was brought out in July last year. One expects it to take a sunny view because it is a government document. I have been in government and know of the sunny view that one takes when one is making a report. I endorse what has been said by others that there is a heck of a lot of first-class work going on in British schools, and I do not want to discount that.
	Skipping through this document, the chapter on primary provision has a helpful shoulder heading:
	"Partnership with parents and the community",
	which recognises that schools are part of the community and that if they are not, they will fail. It goes on to the school profile, which is how a school presents itself to the community. A series of bullet points cover the profile, one of which half way through states,
	"will include information about: school standards—with data about attainment, progress, attendance in comparison with other similar schools . . . How the school serves its pupils . . . The school's own assessment of itself . . . and the most recent Ofsted judgment under those headings . . . What the school offers to enrich the curriculum . . . What the school offers to the wider community [and] The school's priorities for future improvement".
	No mention of behaviour is made, and there is no mention of a whole-school behaviour policy.
	The one thing I recall above all others from chairing an inquiry for a former government many years ago into discipline in schools was that when it was analysed, a school's discipline policy would not work unless everyone in the school was involved in it. That meant, first of all, the teaching staff, and then it meant the non-teaching staff. The janitor must know about the rules if he is to stop bad behaviour in the toilets or behind the bike shed. Dinner ladies need to understand the rules. Noble Lords may raise their eyebrows, but two of our team were present in a school dining room when an admirable and robust school dinner lady was serving the food while a couple of kids got into an argument. That lady, by her sole well-intentioned and vigorous efforts, provoked a riot which could be quelled only by the arrival of the headmaster. So all members of the school have to know the rules—and that includes the children.
	If children feel that they own the school, they will look after it. Similarly, if they feel that they own the behaviour policy, they will abide by it. That was brought forcefully to my attention in Norway where, following the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, we went to see how things were done there. Norway was tackling the problem of absorbing its first immigrant and refugee children into the community. The school we visited was spotless and the children delightfully well behaved. But the first thing one saw was a row of national flags over the front door. Each time a child from another beleaguered country came to the school, its national flag went up. Thus the child felt that this was his school with his flag, or her school with her flag. As a result, the school enjoyed beautiful attendance and was very well run.
	I therefore ask the noble Lord to retrieve, if it has been lost, or to enforce if it has not, the idea that a school can be properly run only if everyone involved, including the parents, has a hand in the behaviour policy. If the parents do not know what is and is not allowed, they will believe what their children tell them. My years as a teacher showed me that children relate a very different story about all sorts of things, particularly about other people's pocket money and what other parents allow their children to do in their spare time.
	The behaviour policy ought to be in the school profile and it ought to be the subject of meetings with parents. In my view, the difficulty lies not in setting it up, but in renewing it to take account of the flood of new children coming through year on year. They have to be involved as well.
	On the secondary years, the report confidently asserts in paragraph 5 of chapter 5 that:
	"Both behaviour and attendance are also improving—with fewer violent incidents and fewer days lost to truancy".
	I shall come back to those, but the report does recognise the importance of the time of transition from primary to secondary school. For the moment I want to go beyond what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, who was most encouraging and full of good ideas. Some of us have forgotten that primary schools are usually small. Children are accustomed to sitting in the same classroom with mostly the same teacher, day after day, teaching them everything. They hang up their coats on their pegs, they sit down at the desk which is theirs for the year, and at the end of the day they go home. That is an established and reassuring pattern of behaviour.
	Suddenly children come into a huge place that looks like a factory, sounds like a starling roost, and offers no clue to where anything is. They find that they have to go to six or seven different rooms and have up to eight teachers for the different subjects. They are expected to be in the right place at the right time and will be in trouble if they are not. That is a very frightening experience. Those children are physically the smallest people in the school, they are most inexperienced, and they are suddenly on their own. That puts a lot of children on the defensive against the entire system. Their defence mechanisms are in place so that their response to a teacher is not to see them as helping but as criticising. Teachers become "them" and the rest of the kids are "us". That is the first dangerous breakdown in communication in the classroom.
	This is all about communication. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, was so right to stress the need to integrate schools in the community, and to say that children take their time. I am afraid that I am taking too much time. In the four minutes I have left, I shall junk much of what I intended to say in order to cast a worried eye on the news that the NAHT has withdrawn from the workload agreement talks.
	If noble Lords want a different view of what is going on in schools, they might look at a publication by the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge commissioned by the NUT entitled A Life in Secondary Teaching: Finding Time for Learning. The report reflects constant complaints. Teachers are supposed to have four or five free periods a week, but at least two are used to cover for teachers who have not turned up, while the other two are used to deal with the fallout from bad behaviour by the children who have been taught by supply teachers in other classes being covered. Out of,
	"4 or 5 periods a week of non-contact time, currently at least two of these will be taken up covering for absent colleagues. The remainder . . . will often be used to deal with disciplinary issues".
	The report was commissioned to assess the impact of recent government initiatives on the professional lives of teachers in secondary schools in England. The key themes are set out, of which the most obvious is the lack of time for reflection and professional space. Another is class size, while the issue of the most overriding concern is pure pupil behaviour. That will not be a surprise to noble Lords. I illustrate the point with one or two quotations:
	"'a constant battle just to be allowed to teach', (Science Advanced Skills Teacher, 15 years' experience) . . . 'One of my tutors coming to me really, really upset. "I could not teach yesterday". 'Two pupils had disrupted her time so badly she couldn't teach that lesson. Two children can have that much impact on the learning of 26 others'".
	The Government need to look at their inclusions policy and to consider what was said by my noble friend Lord Lucas on how to deal with difficult pupils.
	The basis of all this is the proper training of teachers. I was shocked by a huge survey we carried out 16 years ago on new graduates from teacher training institutions to learn—after we had been told by all the colleges without exception that they taught classroom behaviour management as a subject or cross-curricular theme—that 98 per cent of their graduates said that they had received no such training at all. I discovered that when I taught in a teacher training college. I lost their attention when they faced their first teaching practice the following week and I discovered that they had not had any training in behaviour management. I had not been to a training college, but having taught for a number of years, I spent my history lecture periods teaching them how to cope. That training really ought to be standard practice. On a PGCE course, which is so much shorter, it must be included or be provided as an extension.
	My last remark is that some people teach brilliantly, some well, and some cannot teach at all. Those people need an escape hatch. Nothing is closer to my idea of hell than someone realising that he can pursue gainfully his qualified profession only by being ridiculed and belittled by a class of 15 year-olds. He should be supported by being given an alternative placement—but not in the same school. When you have lost your reputation in a school, it is lost for good. What is lost is passed on to the generations coming in: "He is good for a lark". Such teachers must go into a new environment and be given support. But if it does not work, there must be some way of easing such people out into the community where they can contribute positively rather than continue in a school where their contribution is only negative, at the cost of their own misery and damage to the children.
	Teaching is not just work: it is a vocation. It is a glorious profession and a pastoral profession. I am happy to have spent some time in it. I honour those who are in it now, but my goodness they need help. I hope that the Minister can give it.

Baroness Sharp of Guildford: My Lords, I would like to join others in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, for introducing a timely but also extremely interesting debate. It seems that around the Chamber there is a good deal of agreement that there is a problem with behaviour in schools. Many noble Lords have referred to the Ofsted report, Managing Challenging Behaviour, which came out at the beginning of the month.
	In that report Ofsted defines bad behaviour as either physical violence or verbal aggression: verbal abuse against teachers or other pupils; outbursts of temper; bullying behaviour; and defying teachers' authority. Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools picked up low-level disruption as the most common form of bad behaviour in schools. He noted, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, the extent to which since 1997 the proportion of secondary schools where the level of behaviour was judged to be good or excellent had fallen from 75 per cent in 1996–97 to 68 per cent in 2003–04.
	Interestingly, it is only in the past two years—in 2002–03 and 2003–04—that we have seen a fall: it fell to about 72 per cent in the former and there was another fall in the past year. Looking at the figures I noted—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Perry—that those pupils aged 14 today were six or seven in 1997. Those are the children who have benefited from the literacy and numeracy strategy, but perhaps they have suffered from the degree to which our schools have been dominated by an over-rigid curriculum and too much teaching to the test and not enough creativity.
	We need to think about that issue. I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, that it was her Government that introduced the national curriculum and appointed as Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Schools Mr Christopher Woodhead, who tended to create and insist on such rigidity. Since he departed from that post we have seen chief inspectors who have encouraged schools more towards creativity.
	There is also good news, as my noble friend Lady Walmsley noted. If we look at primary schools, the picture is completely the other way round: the proportion with good or excellent behaviour has moved up from 79 per cent in 1996 to over 90 per cent today. There has been a constant improvement.
	We should remember that a majority of schools—even 68 per cent means two-thirds of our schools—show good or excellent behaviour. Nevertheless there is an element of worry that there has been deterioration in our secondary schools. We also know that one-fifth of exclusions are the result of bad, disruptive behaviour; that boys are 10 times more likely than girls to be excluded from schools; and that challenging behaviour comes especially from boys aged eight to nine and 12 to 15. Those boys often have a learning disability, which is termed in education jargon "EBD"—emotional behavioural disorder.
	What should we do about it? The Ofsted report quotes an earlier report, the Elton report of 1989—I wondered whether the noble Lord, Lord Elton, had some hand in it—which states that 80 per cent of disruption in schools is,
	"directly attributable to poor classroom organisation, planning and teaching".
	The Ofsted report states,
	"In most, but not all, of the settings visited in this survey, it is recognised that effective teaching and learning is a key to encouraging good behaviour and engaging those pupils who have the most difficult behaviour".
	My noble friend Lady Walmsley indicated from her own experience how a good teacher can hold a class's attention. The Ofsted report quotes various examples of ways to manage a difficult child in a class. As the noble Lord, Lord Dearing, mentioned, we dwelt on that issue at length in our discussions on the Education Bill earlier this year. We passed amendments in this House asking for two things: first, that Her Majesty's Chief Inspector should report both to the Secretary of State and to the schools themselves and should make note of the behaviour and discipline patterns within the school.
	Secondly—this answers a little the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Elton—we also requested that in changing the name of the Teacher Training Agency to the Training and Development Agency for Schools its role should be to teach how to manage behaviour in the classroom among other matters. To some extent we have already made a move in that direction.
	Referring to factors that affect managing behaviour other noble Lords have inevitably come up with "Jamie's School Dinners", which is important: not just school dinners but sometimes school breakfasts. I am amazed and appalled by the number of children who come to school and have been asked to buy on the way to school a bag of crisps and a can of Coke for their breakfast. As everyone knows, that is not the best breakfast from which to expect some attention span in the morning.
	All teachers will tell us that if they have difficult classes to teach, they teach them in the morning because the children have a better attention span in the morning. School breakfasts as well as school lunches are therefore an important part of answering the problems that lie before us.
	We have also discussed the inclusion agenda and special educational needs. We talked about them at length on the Education Bill and we are all agreed that while the Government's inclusion agenda and the notion that children with special educational needs should as far as possible be included in mainstream schools, nevertheless, unless the resources are there to cope with that requirement, it is a bit of a pipe dream and there are occasions when we need to take children out of the school environment because they disrupt others.
	Disruption is the big problem. But then we come on to exclusions. When we have discussed these issues, all noble Lords have recognised that exclusion is not the answer. Taking a child away from a school and the stability of that environment—particularly a child whose home background may be very turbulent—can cause further disruption in their life. Therefore, where it can be used, the internal pupil referral unit within schools has its advantages. I will return to that point in a moment.
	We need to consider extremely hard whether it is essential to pursue exclusions. The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, quoted the case of appeal panels turning them down, but there is always a balance between the best interests of the child and the best interests of the school. There are always occasions when, if a child has hit out and hit out at teachers, normally they cannot be contained back within the school. But there are also occasions where, if you can bring them back, it is right to do so.

Baroness Perry of Southwark: My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. We have had some inspiring speeches. I shall remember for a long time some of the comments made. I am grateful to all who have spoken.
	We have bounced around some statistics. It is no doubt predictable that the Minister has concentrated on those aspects which are getting better whereas some of us have also concentrated on some which are getting worse. I do not wish to wallow in statistics but the Minister queried one statistic I quoted. I invite him, therefore, to consider his own department's figures. Since 1996-7 there has been a 31 per cent increase in truancy. The figures he quoted were raw numbers: that 40,000 more children are being taught in school. That is more a result of the birth rate than any lack of truants leaving the classroom.
	Like the noble Lord, Lord Mackenzie, I, too, am an optimist by nature. I like to concentrate on the factors which will get better and not those which will get worse. In the light of the concerns expressed in the Ofsted report, it has been right today to consider one area where things are not entirely the half-full cup of the optimist. Those aspects which are going wrong are important and it is right that we consider them. It is for the good of our children in our schools and for society at large that we do our best to get them right rather than simply celebrating the successes.
	However, there is much to celebrate in our schools. I repeat my belief that our teachers are our proudest possession in this country; and I celebrate and trust them completely. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion for Papers.

Lord Howard of Rising: rose to call attention to government planning policies on new house building and the control of Traveller sites; and to move for Papers.
	My Lords, when I put down the Motion I had not imagined there would be such interest in the subject. On first glance the Motion may seem to cover two quite different subjects: the creation of distant and unaccountable regional planning bodies and the growth of illegal Travellers' camps. Under closer scrutiny, however, there is a clear common theme between these two issues—that of "the forgotten majority".
	Since 1997 there have been easily discernible trends of certain people, who are not part of the metropolitan elite, do not work in the media, and are not heads of trade unions or quangos, being ignored. They are the millions of ordinary people who work hard, take responsibility, and respect others and their property. It is these people who are angry at the proposed massive development of greenfield sites: the people who are frustrated by illegal Traveller camps flouting planning laws while local councils and the police stand by powerless. In the debate today, I hope to speak on behalf of these people, some of whom I have the privilege of representing as a district councillor and as a parish councillor. I also declare an interest as a landowner.
	There is a tendency by Government to dismiss as "opportunist" and "disgraceful" attempts to raise issues of importance to the electorate. But in truth the Government's attitude to illegal Traveller sites is another manifestation of how remote Government have become from the anxieties and concerns of ordinary people.
	In this country there are strong and detailed planning controls, reaching even to the control of twigs on small trees. Such laws are justified on varying grounds, such as the protection of the environment, the need to prevent indiscriminate building or to enable people to live in harmony with each other. One can debate whether all such laws are needed. In my view there are far too many. But however much one may agree or disagree over the necessary extent of regulation, it is an accepted fact that the rules have to be obeyed. If they are not, then rectification is required and insisted on. We have all read of children's Wendy houses having to be demolished and other similar incidences.
	In the case of new houses, complex and detailed regulation governing everything from fire hazard to the square millimetres of airflow in a room must all be complied with.
	The Deputy Prime Minister has decided that for one section of the population—Travellers—these laws need no longer apply in the same way that they do to other citizens. It cannot be right that one section of the public should be exempted from the law of the land in a way that acts to the detriment of others. For laws to work they must apply equally to everyone and the rule of law must be supreme.
	Planning laws being unfairly applied to different communities creates resentment and undermines confidence in the system. What can be the feelings of someone who has to apply for planning consent to trim a branch of a tree or of a farmer who has to apply for permission to change a field from grass to arable when he sees parts of the countryside being turned into mobile home parks, with whole trees being torn down and concrete being laid with complete disregard for the law? It is no wonder that there are such strong feelings on the subject.
	Up to now, one of the factors assisting Travellers to break the law has been the human rights legislation which has provided cover for an unscrupulous minority of Travellers to do things which society as a whole has assumed and desired to be illegal. Since the Human Rights Act came into force, the number of unauthorised Traveller encampments in England has risen year by year. Local authorities have counted 1,855 Traveller sites where there has been development without planning permission and a further 2,377 where the development is not only unauthorised but the land itself has been seized illegally.
	This is an example of how human rights legislation can deprive the majority of citizens of their traditional freedoms and protections. There is even a Travellers' website which advises its readers to move on to land before making a planning application. By so doing they will be able to take advantage of the Human Rights Act. Let us hope that the verdict of the court yesterday will put an end to, or at least severely limit, that abuse.
	A recent government statement emphasised the importance of adequate provision of appropriate accommodation for Gypsy and Traveller communities and raised the possibility of the use of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 to enforce this.
	Where special provisions are made for certain members of society, there is a strong and corresponding obligation for them to conform to the law and not to inconvenience or irritate other citizens. Rights and privileged treatment carry obligations. The argument made by Government that illegal occupation of property is caused by an inadequate number of sites is open to doubt.
	There are far greater numbers of recent arrivals in this country, such as asylum seekers, than there are Travellers. These new arrivals have found accommodation without breaking the law. Except for financial gain, there is no obvious need for Travellers to contravene planning laws. Planning consent for caravan parks is often given. There is nothing to stop Travellers seeking sites which comply with planning laws, or where planning permission could be obtained before occupation.
	Not all Travellers choose to pursue their distinctive lifestyle in an illegal way. Indeed only a minority do so. The majority of Travellers obey planning laws and live within them. For them, it is essential that the law be applied impartially before the law abiding majority of Travellers come to be judged in the same way, and share the same odium, as the minority who break the law. It is a minority of Travellers who have decided to go outside the law and treat building law and regulations with contempt.
	By acting in this way, the minority of Travellers bring the whole of their community into disrepute. Worse, a fear and dislike of Travellers is created. Lack of action by the authorities on illegal sites is against the interests of those law abiding members who form the majority of the travelling community.
	The way of life of Travellers is a long and distinguished one. The single largest group, the Romanies, have been known in Britain since the 16th century. It is dreadful that a minority who insist on pursuing their lives in an illegal manner ruin the esteem in which this community should be held.
	Claims have been made that insisting that the rule of law should apply to all, including Travellers, is racist and discriminatory. That is such a superficial accusation that one can only assume that people making such comments have not yet learned joined-up thinking. The great majority of Travellers respect the rule of law and happily practise their chosen way of life within the laws and customs of this country. It is not those who call for the law to be respected and applied equally to all citizens who are damaging the reputation of Travellers, it is the minority of Travellers themselves who act illegally which is creating problems.
	We have seen over the past few days the sensitivity of this subject. It has been complicated greatly by the existence of the Human Rights Act, which sooner or later must be revisited if these and other injustices are to be addressed. At the very least, the Government should allow and give powers to local authorities to act in a way that will protect homeowners from having their peace shattered and the value of their houses destroyed. There are thousands of homeowners living in fear and trepidation of an illegal encampment appearing next to them. At rural parish meetings the biggest complaint in recent times has been the lack of police. Concern about illegal Travellers has taken over, and this should not be ignored.
	I look forward to hearing other contributions to this debate. I beg to move for Papers.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer: My Lords, I believe that this is the first time in this Chamber that I have debated with the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising. Indeed, we shall have a true debate this afternoon, because my views could not be more different from his, in many respects. In my short contribution, I shall seek to remind the noble Lord why we have arrived in the situation that we have in this country. In doing so, I must declare an interest as a Somerset county councillor and point out that when, previously, I was leader of South Somerset District Council and as a parish councillor I had a long involvement with the provision of traveller sites.
	I was slightly taken aback by the lack of recollection of the noble Lord, Lord Howard, because I shall provide more detail than I had intended. Between 1968 and 1994, there was a continual provision nationally of traveller sites to solve exactly the types of problems that he outlined in his speech. In my own county of Somerset, for example, we established six fixed sites and one transit site—sometimes, it must be said, in the face of Conservative opposition, but often with good co-operation from Conservative councillors, sometimes in whose patches these sites were to be found. We also developed, in conjunction with the private sector, 50 private sites that varied in size. Altogether there were about 150 pitches.
	However, in 1994, the noble Lord's namesake, Michael Howard, who was then Home Secretary, issued the infamous Circular 1/94, which removed the duty from local councils to provide sites and was one of the most divisive examples of what could have been done with regard to the settled community and the traveller community. It opened up several issues. First, it raised the question as to why councils were providing such sites at all and, secondly, it started to raise the question—an easy campaigning question for those who chose to campaign on that type of platform—as to why councils should spend any money providing traveller sites. So it became far more difficult to pursue the, until then, successful provision of sites in conjunction with the community, which involved working with parish councils and district councillors. In that one act of introducing Circular 1/94, Michael Howard undermined many years' work of calm and effective provision—albeit sometimes difficult.
	I am so surprised by the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, has not remembered, or perhaps was not aware in 1994, that that is why we have arrived at the situation we are in now, that I felt it necessary to make those points.
	The noble Lord mentioned that there was nothing to stop travellers seeking other legal sites. Strictly speaking that is true, if he is looking at the letter of the law. But if, like us, he tried to find a solution now, in the face of the type of divisive attitude that was introduced by the Conservative party with that one circular, he would find it impossible to work with communities in the same constructive way. Raising the level of the debate, as is the case this afternoon, should encourage the Government—and, I hope any future government—to take a firm grip of the situation and resolve it in a far more constructive way, as I believe that this Government intend to do.
	I should like to suggest a few pointers to a more constructive way forward than simply decrying the current lack of legal sites and then blaming those who are on illegal sites for that situation. We now need a regional approach to the provision of sites, so that it no longer is a question of one district or county doing its very best, only to be frustrated by the next county, which may be under different political control—perhaps Conservative control, given what I have heard from at least the Conservative Back Benches this afternoon—which will provide no sites and will cause the flooding of travellers over the county boundary into the responsible county's area. A regional approach would therefore be productive.
	Secondly, the Government should bear in mind the lessons that were learned over the years when councils were able to provide sites, as a duty. That is: that small sites work best. As a councillor, some of the time that we spent sorting out difficult issues between sites and the community was when site provision was for 10, or 18, or 20 pitches, or more. Certainly, the sites that worked best were those making provision for eight families or fewer.
	Thirdly, can the Minister comment on the rent services involved? When it comes to private sector provision, a reference rent is fixed at £26 per family, per week. That is far too low to encourage helpful involvement from the private sector. Those are a few of my observations on a constructive way forward.
	I particularly look forward to hearing the contribution of my noble friend Lord Avebury, who has done more than anybody in this House to raise this issue—and to underline the seriousness of the lack of provision, and the imperative need for a duty upon councils to provide sites. Having said that, I also look forward to hearing other contributions—particularly from the Conservative Front Bench, for the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, is known for her constructive approach to problems. I expect to hear some of her solutions today.

Lord Lucas: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Howard for giving us the chance to have this debate. In a way, I hope that there is not much point in this debate—and that this Government's planning policies will be a thing of the past in a month or so, when we can look forward to a rather more constructive regime. But on the off-chance that they are something that we have to live with for a bit longer, I want to address myself to them in a general sense—at least, to begin with—and to the concept of fairness that has been raised. This is a terribly important concept in planning.
	As in many other areas, we have decided to give up many personal rights in the common good. It hurts us a great deal when we see people getting away with flouting those restrictions that we have imposed upon ourselves. Most of us will have experienced sitting dutifully beside a bus lane, only to see people whizzing up on the inside, knowing that they are not going to be caught. These days, they do get caught—thank goodness for bus lane cameras—and that pain has been removed from us. Yet generally, where we have accepted a set of restrictions, we want them to be enforced and obeyed. That really applies to planning in a big way.
	One difficulty with planning is that so much of it has become centralised. It has very much been a tendency of this Government—when we were dealing with the last Planning Bill, and previously—to try to centralise planning decisions, and take them away from the local community, or "regionalise" them, which amounts to the same thing. I would like to see a planning system which paid a great deal more attention to what a particular community wanted.
	One effect of centralisation is that an enormous number of villages around the UK which want development; which want better provision of affordable housing and which want to be allowed to develop themselves in ways which will give additional provision of facilities, find it an extremely hard thing to do. It seems all that they are allowed to do is to sit there and wait for some developer to try and dump a housing estate on them. The initiative is not with local communities to develop themselves. The system is imposed on them from the top: by regional, county and district planning authorities—and by the whims of developers.
	I would like to see a system where what a community wanted to happen was much more important in deciding the pattern of provision. That would help too when one was dealing with obligations. Clearly, there do have to be obligations imposed on communities. If we are to have wind farms, somebody has to have them. If we need more housing, from a national point of view—which I believe we do—then it has to go somewhere. It is the function of central government to make sure that these things happen. Yet, rather than someone sitting in Whitehall saying, "It will be you, Ashford—it's your turn to have 70,000 more people" I would like communities to be allowed to bid for the provision of housing.
	If the planning gain—which otherwise wanders off into other things that local authorities happen to want to do—was to attach itself to those who volunteered for the provision of new housing, we would find a lot of communities saying "Well, yes; another 100 houses would be great. That would secure the future of the school. It would mean that the local shop was viable. The bus service would not require our subsidy any more. It would be good for the local cricket team too". One way and another, there are many benefits that come with development—if you are allowing a community to decide that this is what it wants, that these are the kind of houses it wants to provide, and that this is the location it wants to put them in. If the Government would let things run down to the local community much more, it would find that these big problems in the middle would not be so high. None the less, there does need to be a system which deals with obligations.
	One obligation that I accept, and which we should accept as a nation, is to make proper provision for the travelling community. Human Rights Act or not, I cannot see that that is something we should seek to avoid doing, or do less than well. Therefore I share the regret of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, at Circular 1/94. That decision was one of the mistakes of the last Government; I hope it is not one that we would repeat in a future government. To deal so one-sidedly with a problem is not, it seems to me, a proper response to our obligations as human beings. None the less, there is an obligation which has to be shared out—and we are in a position where many local communities argue extremely strongly against having a part in providing a solution to that obligation. That is probably fundamental and natural. The settled community has always fought with those who want to live a nomadic life; there is always a conflict of interest between the two.
	I disagree with my noble friend Lord Howard in his implication that, in some way, the planning system can deal fairly with a nomadic community. It cannot, for it is run by—and in the interests of—the settled community. There have to be special provisions for the nomadic community. I do not, however, share the implied approbation of the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for the Government's chosen solution which appears to be that, until a local authority meets the proper provision of sites locally, it is a free-for-all for anyone who wants to establish a site of their own. There really is no reason why individual, local communities should be made to pay in that way for the failure of their local authority.

Lord Avebury: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, suggested that there should be a national obligation. He took part in the debate on the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, which created precisely such a framework. In the regional spatial strategies, there will be regional targets feeding down into the local authorities as specific numbers of pitches which must be provided over a given period.
	I was surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, in his speech appeared to be totally ignorant of everything we have been doing in the past two years as well as giving a complete caricature of how the present planning system works.
	Two critical pieces of the jigsaw are missing. The first is guidance to local authorities on how to incorporate the needs of Gypsies and Travellers in their housing needs assessment, as required by the Housing Act 2004. That was supposed to appear at the end of last year but has still to be published and the consultation period ended only last week. The second is the promised outcome of the Government's strategic review of policy on Gypsies. It was originally expected in the spring 2004 and then, in the evidence given by Keith Hill to the Select Committee on the ODPM, it was promised for the end of the summer. That, too, has yet to see the light of day.
	We had already lost nine months between the publication of the Niner report in October 2002 and the start of the government review in the summer of 2003. Therefore, there is justification for the criticism in last Saturday's Guardian leader that if Labour had acted firmly and earlier, we would not now have the tabloids inciting racial hatred against Gypsies and Travellers. But, as my noble friend said, the real culprits are the Tories, whose infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 is largely responsible for the present sites crisis.
	Now at least we have the legislative framework in place for a comprehensive solution to the problem of accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers, which is the essential pre-requisite for solving all the other problems, such as their education and health deprivation, and their economic and social exclusion.
	The Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act secures the allocation of land by local authorities for Gypsy sites in accordance with numbers derived from the authorities' own housing needs assessments. In December, the ODPM issued a consultation paper on how the process should be conducted. The paper states that where there is an assessment of unmet needs for sites, the local authority should prepare a "development plan document" identifying suitable land for the purpose.
	Money is available through the regional housing boards for housing associations to build new sites. It would be useful if the Minister could say how much money the Government have allocated and what steps they are taking to enlist the RSLs to take part in the process. The Minister will remember that we have always said that this was a weak link in the chain and that although it may be true that most Gypsies would like to provide their own sites in theory, there will be a proportion—at a guess, 25 to 30 per cent—who will need to rely on social provision. As yet, there is no sign of interest from any social landlord other than Novas, whose unique work with the Gypsy and Traveller community is not sufficiently recognised and appreciated.
	Under the Housing Act, local authorities have to take into consideration the needs of Gypsies and Travellers and incorporate them in their mainstream housing needs assessments. They also have an obligation, which most of them disregard, to consider the needs of Gypsies on unauthorised sites under the provisions of the Homelessness Act 2002.
	And further, they have a duty under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act to promote equality of opportunity for Gypsies and Irish Travellers; to set out policies for achieving this in their race equality scheme; and to promote good relations between Gypsies and other groups. It is most encouraging to note that the Commission for Racial Equality is now in the process of conducting a wide-ranging survey in which they have received written replies from some 150 local authorities and is conducting a detailed examination of nine on just how they are going about complying with those obligations.
	The Tory leader, Michael Howard, claims that if you are a Traveller, you can build anywhere you like, thanks to the Human Rights Act. He says that he will amend or even repeal the Act if necessary, and presumably the same applies pari passu to all the other legislation which gets in the way of shoving Gypsies back on to the roadside, even though none of this legislation was opposed at the time by his party. But this is the Michael Howard who created most of the problems we now face when, as Home Secretary, he repealed the Caravan Sites Act 1968. At the same time, he issued the ineffective and futile circular 194, mentioned by my noble friend Lady Miller.
	Up until 1994, councils had to provide sites for Gypsies residing in or resorting to their area and the arithmetic shows that if you project the number of pitches they were providing during the previous eight years leading up to the expiry of that obligation into the future, the councils would have provided an additional 1,500 pitches for permanent sites. The Tories sabotaged that programme without putting anything in its place, and now they are proposing to repeat the same fatal mistake.
	Tory spokesman Eric Pickles, too, falsely claims that,
	"Travellers are now free to disregard planning laws and occupy public land".
	He, his leader Mr Howard and the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, are all wrong, and their statements are dangerous and irresponsible. I add the epithets which the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, ascribed to somebody in the Government: they are opportunistic and disgraceful as well. Maybe they got the idea from the Australian election Rottweiler, Mr Lynton Crosby, of whom the author of a book on the other Howard's 2001 campaign in Australia said:
	"The kind of stuff he seems to be really interested in is the grubby low-level stuff of tapping into a community's prejudices and exploiting them".
	I certainly hope that the Tories are not going to base their campaign on stirring up hatred against minorities, and that they will put Mr Crosby on a shorter leash. Let us have a debate based on the facts, and not on fanning prejudice against a particularly vulnerable minority.
	Brentwood Council, in Essex, is objecting to a direction by the Secretary of State to produce a development plan document for Gypsies by January 2007, even though there is manifestly an unmet need in the area. There are unauthorised encampments in Brentwood, as well as in most of the authorities in Essex and the eastern region as a whole. The number has grown steeply over recent years.
	It may be that the travellers living in Brentwood had a stronger claim to be accommodated in, say, Braintree, Chelmsford or Basildon—even though, according to the official count of the ODPM, there were more caravans on unauthorised sites in those areas than in Brentwood. The local authorities in Essex should get together and negotiate on how many sites are to be provided in each district or borough. I understand from a seminar that I attended on Monday that this is already happening. The county council in Essex and their equivalents in Kent and Cambridgeshire are now bringing the district authorities together to see of they can agree.
	I realise—and I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, will remind us from the debates we had on the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004—that county councils have no formal role in this matter. They can be important facilitators, however, in ensuring that there is an equitable sharing of the planning duty, so that the numbers are sufficient to eliminate unauthorised encampments in the whole county. As my noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer has suggested, that has to be taken up to a regional level if the numbers are going to balance. If we do this, the buck-passing which has gone on over the last 40 years can be ended, and interventions by the Secretary of State under Section 21 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act can be minimised.
	What does the law actually say about unauthorised encampments and the Human Rights Act? There has been a lot of misunderstanding on this matter, some of which we have heard this evening. The House of Lords decided in the case of Qazi that, where a public authority had an unqualified right to possession via the county court on the termination of a right to occupy property, Article 8(2)—right to respect for family life—does not come into play.
	In the Connors case, on the other hand—decided in the European Court of Human Rights; where the council was evicting the family from a pitch they had occupied lawfully for the previous 18 years—the main issue was that the procedural guarantees were inferior to those enjoyed by non-Gypsy occupiers of mobile homes. The Government tried to defend their position by arguing that, although a licensee on a traveller site could be more easily evicted than someone who lived on a site regulated under the Mobile Homes Act 1983, that distinction was justified by a "pressing social need" and was proportionate to the legitimate aim being pursued. After the case went against them, the Government made amendments in the Housing Act 2004, which made the eviction of Gypsies from council sites similar to the eviction of non-Gypsies from Mobile Homes Act sites, although under different legislation.
	In the Court of Appeal last week, the situation was quite different. The Maloney family were trespassing on land belonging to Leeds City Council. If the right to family life did arise, it could have far-reaching implications, allowing not only Gypsies but anybody else who occupied a public open space to contest their removal on Article 8 grounds. As counsel said in this case, however, all that Connors had demonstrated was that the state of the law which dealt with a local authority's right to recover land forming part of a Gypsy site was incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, and that has now been rectified. Most other statutory regimes governing the recovery of possession, if complied with by the court, would probably achieve the balance required by Article 8(2). The Court of Appeal was perfectly entitled to look at the circumstances of the Maloney case from that point of view, rather than relying heavily, as they did, on the decision of the House of Lords in the case of Qazi.
	In dismissing the appeal, however, the court left the existing law dealing with unauthorised encampments and developments exactly as it was, and that is the point. The Human Rights Act does not give carte blanche to any person, whether a Gypsy or not, who plonks a caravan down in the Green Belt, an AONB or an SSSI. As the European Court said in the Chapman case:
	"The Court will be slow to grant protection to those who, in conscious defiance of the prohibitions of the law, establish a home on an environmentally protected site".
	On the other hand, where the environmental considerations are less material and the local authority fails to satisfy its obligation of meeting the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers, as in the Chichester case, the planning inspector may properly decide that a local authority has failed to justify its interference with the applicant's Article 8 rights.
	These cases, where the human rights of the family are carefully balanced against planning policies determined by Parliament, are apparently all to be swept aside by Mr Howard, so that no unauthorised development can ever be justified on Article 8 grounds, whatever the circumstances. If I am wrong, and the Tories concede that the right to family life may in some circumstances outweigh planning considerations, then I am open to correction. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, will do so when she comes to wind up. However, the Tories would have to say when they would allow the courts to decide, and when Article 8 is to be disallowed.
	Thinking about the case of a Gypsy family on land belonging to a local authority, the council has the right to recover possession against any trespasser through the county court, or to give directions to the trespassing occupier to leave the land and take any vehicles or property with him. Failure to comply with these directions already attracts criminal penalties, under Mr Howard's own Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which he seems to have forgotten.
	Further, in the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, the police were given the power to remove trespassers on an unauthorised site to some other place, identified by the local authority as suitable within their area. We said at the time that these powers were not likely to be used much, because there would seldom be any official site with a suitable vacancy in the area to which those people could be moved. It would be interesting to know, however, whether the Minister has any figures on the exercise of those powers.
	There are also temporary stop notice powers, which have not been mentioned this evening, allowing councils to halt unauthorised development of sites on penalty of criminal sanctions. Now Mr Howard wants to make trespass by Gypsies an absolute criminal offence, irrespective of whether they have anywhere else to go. This is said to be modelled on the Irish legislation. However, the criminal trespass provisions of their Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2002 appear to be similar to those in the 1994 Act in this country. In the year 2002-03 there were 88 traveller evictions in Ireland under this legislation. That does not solve anything, however, because they already have a severe shortage of accommodation, amounting to 1,000 pitches. Evictions would only be a sensible policy, either in Ireland or England, if the people being targeted could move onto a lawful site.
	The mechanisms of the Housing Act and the Planning Act are not an instant fix, but they do provide a medium-term solution, given continued leadership by Ministers and political parties, and collaboration between local authorities, registered social landlords and the Gypsy and traveller communities. We should not allow them to be subverted by racist media coverage, inflammatory speeches on the hustings, and the unprincipled exploitation of prejudice against the most socially excluded and deprived of all the minorities in our country.
	If we allow that to happen, both Gypsies and the settled population are heading for a disaster. The confrontations that result from unauthorised developments will escalate and the misery and degradation of the 4,000 families without a lawful place to live will be handed down to the next generation and we will have lost the first and best opportunity for 40 years.

Lord Cobbold: My Lords, I intend to speak to the first part of the Motion, relating to the Government's planning policies for new housebuilding. It is stating the obvious to say that one reason for the huge rise in house prices, especially in the south-east of England, has been the shortage of supply. There has been an almost total block on new housing, other than in urban areas and on brownfield sites.
	The Metropolitan green belt around London was established in 1955. Before I go any further, I must declare an interest as a landowner in the green belt in Hertfordshire. The fundamental aim of green belt policy, as stated in planning policy guidance PPG2 is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open. Few would disagree with that objective. The same is true of the five purposes of including land within green belt listed in paragraph 1.5 of PPG2. They are:
	"To check the unrestricted sprawl of large built up areas . . . To prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another . . . To assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment . . . To preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and . . . To assist in urban regeneration by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land".
	It is hard to quarrel with any of those objectives and over the years since 1955 they have been successfully achieved, but not without some negative consequences. In addition to the general shortage of supply that has been created, the most significant negative consequence has been the effect on villages and hamlets within the green belt, the natural evolution of which has effectively been frozen in time. That effect is well known and much discussed. The demand for rural housing has made it impossible for the children and grandchildren of families who have lived in the area for generations to live there any more. They are forced to move into town and the villages become commuter dormitories. The new arrivals add extensions to their properties, which is permitted under paragraph 3.6 of PPG2, thus adding to the value of the homes or cottages and further reducing supply of affordable housing.
	Both PPG2 and PPG3, which deals with housing, allow for limited infilling and the provision of some affordable housing to meet local needs but, in practice, especially within the green belt, that very rarely happens. Instead, village schools and shops are forced to close and community village life becomes a fading memory. It is for those reasons that I believe that the green belt restrictions are too extreme.
	Paragraph 1.7 of PPG2 states:
	"the quality of the landscape is not relevant to the inclusion of land within a Green Belt".
	That blanket declaration smothers the fact that landscapes and village settings within green belt areas vary enormously. There are clearly sites where development would be seriously detrimental to the green belt objectives, but there are many others, often small ones, where sympathetic, quality development would have no negative impact and should, indeed, make a political contribution to the natural evolution of the local community, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Indeed, under a Section 106 agreement, or its equivalent, some of the planning gain could be contractually directed towards other recognised needs or improvements within the community. Any development would of course need to be judged on quality of design and sympathy with local style and building materials.
	To say that the quality of the landscape is not relevant to the inclusion of land within a green belt is simply too extreme. The quality of landscape should be relevant.
	What can be done about that? One possible mechanism is to build into the green belt classification a grading system similar to that which exists for listed historic buildings—grade I, grade II star, and so on—with different rules applicable at each level. If that is too complicated, another idea would be to develop the concept of "white land". Paragraph 2.12 of PPG2 allows for what it calls "safeguarded land" or "white land". Local planning authorities are expected to identify land which,
	"may be required to meet longer-term development needs",
	and should therefore be excluded from the green belt.
	The concept of white land could be broadened to include land within an existing green belt to be reclassified to allow for the reasonable provision, over time, of affordable housing and/or other modest and well designed development in keeping with its surroundings that poses no threat to the basic objectives of the green belt. A register of white land could be established by inviting landowners to submit applications to local planning authorities for the redesignation of specific sites within the green belt as white land. If accepted in principle, such sites would be included in the local development plan and subsequent planning applications affecting them would be considered on their merits.
	That idea is probably fanciful, but the subject merits discussion. I strongly believe in the objectives of the green belt, but also believe that their application has been too extreme. I feel strongly that it is wrong to dictate that the quality of the landscape is not relevant in green belt designation. It is probably too much to hope for to expect the Government, in the run-up to an election, to reconsider PPG2 and to sponsor a review of green belt boundaries on the lines that I have suggested. Nevertheless, I look forward to hearing the Minister's comments on the matter.

Lord Greaves: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, for sponsoring this debate. Like him, I declare an interest as a member of a local authority, in my case, Pendle Borough Council. I regret to say that I did not agree with a great deal of what the noble Lord said in opening the debate, but that is the purpose of debate—that we have different points of view and discuss them.
	I do not want talk about the problems of Traveller and Gypsy sites, except to say in passing how much of a privilege it is to take part in the debate with my noble friend Lord Avebury, who has a distinguished record of nearly 40 years of campaigning and promoting these matters within Parliament and outside. I can remember a long time ago, in 1968, when I was just about still a Young Liberal, campaigning in rural Cheshire on behalf the Caravan Sites Act 1968, which my noble friend piloted through the House of Commons. It will be a living tribute to him for a long time. Even if it has been repealed, the problems and the needs continue.
	I do not want to talk about the issues implied in the first half of the Motion although, like the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, I want mainly to talk about the problems in the south-east and eastern region where, by and large, communities, local authorities and regional assemblies are resisting pressure to build a certain number of houses and trying to reduce the number. The position in the part of the world in which I live is very much the opposite. In many ways, it is really quite bizarre.
	I speak in particular about East Lancashire and its local authorities, especially my local authority area of Pendle, although the position is similar in others, such as Burnley and Hyndburn, although perhaps not quite as acute. I am not expecting detailed answers from the Minister to all the points that I am about to raise in this debate, but I hope that Members of the Government and their civil servants will at least take this opportunity to read what I have to say.
	In my borough, we have a moratorium on granting new planning permission for housing of any sort other than one-for-one, where houses are demolished. Apart from that there is to be no planning permission, not just for new greenfield sites but for brownfield sites, for conversions of all kinds whether large or small, for small-scale proposals such as a bungalow in the back garden of a large house, granny flat extensions—whatever it is, there is a moratorium on giving any more planning permission for new housing. That is something which people find quite extraordinary. We do not want lots of new estates built on green fields but we do want to be able to use new housing applications as a sensible part of the regeneration of the old towns.
	Not only is there a moratorium, but on the present policies, without any changes taking place in the mean time to government policies, regional policies, county policies or local policies, this moratorium will last for the next 11 years. So for the next 11 years, on the basis of present policies, there is no more planning permission for new housing in the Borough of Pendle. It is not quite so acute in other districts but the same applies. Noble lords may think this is bizarre, they may think that it is nonsense when there is such pressure to build in other parts of the country, and where there is a willingness to build new units in appropriate places in East Lancashire, but it is nevertheless the situation which we have got into.
	Why has this happened? Without going into too much detail, we have planning policies which are too rigid and which are out of date before they are adopted. We have a situation where there are changes in the market conditions, in which more people are prepared to invest in new housing in areas like ours for a number of reasons—partly because they see the attractiveness and the value of these areas and there is a sense of confidence which perhaps was not there a few years ago. It is also partly because of the very great restrictions on planning in neighbouring areas, such as the Ribble Valley, a lot of which is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Going the other way, to the east, over the border into Yorkshire takes you into the Yorkshire Dales National Park where there are very strict planning controls.
	People are therefore looking at other areas—areas like ours which are attractive and which have stunning Pennine countryside, and where there is a new appreciation of the way in which the old mill towns can be modernised and renovated and might play a part in the years ahead.
	The Joint Lancashire County Structure Plan has just been adopted, several years late. The Pendle local plan—an old style local plan, not one of the new ones under the new Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004— has not yet been adopted and is going to inquiry this summer. Both are hopelessly out of date even before they are adopted. The whole planning system is simply not working. The structures and the statutory documents are out of date before they start. Yet, the ODPM—the same department that is responsible for the structure plan, the local plan and the rest—has declared that a large piece of north-east Lancashire is part of the new housing market renewal areas.
	Pendle, Burnley, Blackburn, Hindburn are all areas where the old terraced housing market is supposed to have collapsed—as it certainly has in some places but not in others—and where a huge government resource is being put in to renovate, restructure and refurbish. Huge resources are being put in to regenerate these old towns—many millions of pounds a year in each of these relatively small districts. As part of that we have to carry out what are called "area development framework studies" which are just another sort of local plan to add to the rest.
	In towns like Colne, Nelson, Brierfield and Burnley these ADF studies are taking place. In my own town of Colne this ADF study took place last year and has come up with exciting proposals which involve the regeneration of an old industrial valley, the waterside area of Colne, involving perhaps up to 700 new dwelling units. A lot of it is by mixed-use conversion of industrial properties. There is a huge old mill there which is almost certainly going to become empty fairly soon, which, it is proposed, should be the focus of a great regeneration of this old industrial valley.
	All kinds of things are being put forward, such as apartments, craft workshops and perhaps a new cinema. It depends on being able to provide the new housing units, yet we have a moratorium for the next 11 years saying no more housing units and no more planning permission. We have the Government on the one hand with their planning policies. On the other hand they are saying, "let us have a great refurbishment" and are possibly prepared to put millions of pounds into such a refurbishment. The system is not exactly tied up together. The government department does not seem to have its ducks in a row.
	Now we have The Northern Way, one of the great exciting glossy things that Mr Prescott keeps publishing, telling us what a great thing it is going to be in the north of England. It appears that in east Lancashire we are part of a new city region called the Central Lancashire City Region. We were not asked if we wanted to be in central Lancashire but I suppose it is better than being left out of it. The whole concept of these new city regions is regeneration through growth.
	The whole Northern Way proposal is the Government's staggering attempt—and I mean they are staggering towards making an attempt rather than something which is staggering in its brilliance—to somehow claw their way back to having a regional policy in this country. This is something that governments of both the Tory Party and the Labour Party have been setting their face against for a long time. We do not understand why the Labour Party in particular, with its base of support in places like the north of England, does not adopt a regional policy. But it is perhaps slowly moving towards it. Here we have The Northern Way telling us that we are going to be part of a growth corridor. Yet at the same time, how can we be part of a growth corridor when we cannot give planning permission for any more housing for the next 11 years? It is absolute nonsense.
	Only two years ago the Government cut the allocation of new housing units in the north-west, under the old regional planning guidance, by 15 per cent. The central Government said that the north-west could have 15 per cent fewer houses than people in the north-west wanted to build. Two years later they come back telling us, "It's The Northern Way—it's all going to be wonderful and we're going to be the new area of growth and prosperity". It does not add up.
	What damage is being done? Some of it is just silly. It means that untidy pieces of land, where the obvious way of bringing that piece of land back into use—it might be an area where perhaps workshops were knocked down a few years ago, or it might be old allotments which have fallen into disrepair over the years—and helping to refurbish and regenerate the area is by building a small number of houses on them. But we cannot do it.
	There could be important buildings in the locality whose existing use has become redundant—perhaps old Co-op shops on the street corner, or perhaps small mills or whatever—and the obvious thing to do is to convert them to apartments and housing, but we cannot do it. That is apart from the obvious nonsense of telling people that they cannot have a granny-flat extension where they otherwise could. The approach harms sensible, small-scale local regeneration, which is necessary if those areas are to be part of genuine housing market restructuring. We are then told that we cannot go ahead with a major scheme to regenerate and "transform"—housing market renewal people like to use that word—a whole valley because planning policies decided some years ago in different circumstances still apply.
	The Government must do two things. They must get their ducks in a row. Statutory planning documents that are no longer relevant must be pushed aside and superseded, even if they have not yet been formally adopted, in the interests of what the Government are trying to do in regeneration areas; otherwise, we will not be able to regenerate as they want. The statutory plans say that towns must be closed down and that there should be no growth and development. The Government's housing market renewal strategies say, "Invest to regenerate". The Northern Way talks about growth corridors and proposes regeneration in that way.
	The Government have not got their act together in those areas. Nothing can be done at local level because we are constrained by the statutory planning framework. It is the basis on which inspectors will consider an application for planning permission. If a council tries to give planning permission and override those documents, the Government will refuse it. It is all nonsense. In many ways, the Government's intentions through their new initiatives are good, but the planning process is holding them back. I hope that people will at least read what I have said and understand some of the problems.
	The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said that he thought that councils should be able to bid for housing allocations. We would love to be able to bid, but we are banned from doing so.

Baroness Scott of Needham Market: My Lords, the two very different halves of this debate have given us an interest range of issues to discuss. I declare an interest as a Suffolk county councillor. That is also a means of putting firmly on the table my credentials as a rural dweller. I am not, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, suggested of others, part of any metropolitan elite.
	I shall begin with housing policy generally. We certainly agree with the Government that the number of households has been rising much faster than the supply of new housing. But we part company at that point because we do not agree with the Government that simply building more houses in London and the south-east will deal with the problem. Put simply, it is not just that there are too few houses but rather that many are in the wrong place, at the wrong price and in the wrong condition. There is not one housing market in this country and neither should there be one set of planning policies.
	As my noble friend Lord Greaves said, many years of poorly implemented and ill thought-out regional strategies have resulted in huge imbalances in this country. The economy of London and the south-east overheats while we see the near collapse of the housing market in parts of the north-west.
	Over the past 10 years, house prices have risen on average from three and half times to six times an annual salary. That means that houses are becoming increasingly far beyond the reach of many people, particularly the young. I wonder whether the Government have any evidence that building large numbers of houses in London and the south-east will resolve the problem and dampen house prices to anything but a marginal extent. Will it be enough to create access for first-time buyers, who struggle to get on the market?
	Since the late 1950s, the provision of new housing has been pretty steady—150,000 to 200,000 have been built each year. Last year, however, only 21,000 of those units were social housing; that is where the real problem lies in many areas. Since the right to buy was introduced, almost 2 million council and housing association properties have been acquired under that scheme and therefore been lost from the social housing sector. That shortfall has been brought to the Government's attention by all sorts of organisations, including the Rowntree Foundation and the Council for the Protection of Rural England. The noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, outlined the problems in rural communities, where people are simply priced out of their local housing market.
	The thread that brings together the very different comments of the noble Lords, Lord Cobbold and Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lord Greaves is the inappropriateness of over-centralised planning in this country. Local councils, working individually and in regions, sub-regions or, heaven preserve us, even city regions, are better able to respond to the circumstances of their area.
	The issue of travellers has occupied most of the debate. It is a difficult and sensitive issue, with a complex mix of social and legal factors at play. The problem of resolving these difficulties is not helped by the sensationalist campaigning style adopted recently by the Conservative leadership. It is not wrong to raise the issue but how it is done, the tone of the debate, is crucial. At risk of causing him some embarrassment, I have to say that if all the Conservative contributions to the debate were carried out in the sort of measured and thoughtful tones expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, today, we would all be a lot better off.
	As we have heard, Michael Howard's Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which removed the duty from councils to provide Traveller sites and, as importantly, removed the grant funding for providing the sites, has caused the problem. It is perfectly obvious, and it should have been obvious then, that cash-strapped local authorities will not spend scarce resources on areas of activity that are both discretionary and unpopular. This is one of the few occasions when noble Lords will hear Liberal Democrats saying that more central control is needed, because it helps to resolve this very difficult issue for local authorities.
	As a result of the 1994 Act, we now have an estimated shortfall of 4,500 caravan pitches across the country. Having scoured the recent Conservative proposals to deal with the problem, I have found nothing to address the shortfall. The result of the proposals would simply be that occupants of those caravans would be repeatedly moved on, at potentially great expense to local councils and the police, and to the detriment of the travellers.
	What makes me very sad is that, until this election bandwagon got rolling, a great deal of cross-party work behind the scenes had been aimed at resolving those difficult issues. The Local Government Association, which is now Conservative led, had been working to develop a set of proposals to assist councils in tackling the problems of unlawful Travellers' sites. It has agreed that the main problem is the lack of unallocated sites. The Conservative chairman of the association said on 8 November,
	"the travelling community have a right to their lifestyle, and local councils are obliged to provide them with services as they would to members of the settled community".
	Conservatives in another place led the introduction of a cross-party Traveller Reform Bill in July 2002. It contained sensible and measured approaches combining tougher enforcement with the provision of legal sites. But that consensus has now been tossed aside under intense media scrutiny and debate, which has shed much more heat than light. I hope that my noble friend Lord Avebury, among others, has helped to untangle some of those complicated issues.
	We must look at retrospective planning permission. There are cases where Travellers have created sites on land that they have purchased and then applied for planning permission. But let us be clear that, while that practice might be undesirable, it is not an offence. On a smaller scale it happens all the time within the settled population. People make developments and then apply for planning permission afterwards. It is not just about development control. For the eight years in which I chaired the Suffolk county council rights of way committee, the bane of my life was dealing with extensions and outbuildings that had been knowingly built over public rights of way. Of course, it is perfectly possible for the local authority to take enforcement action by demolishing someone's garage extension or barn, but in reality that does not happen.
	I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Howard, that when I talked to landowners who had built barns over public rights of way, at no point did a landowner say, "Well, I'll take my barn down. The rule of law must reign supreme". If retrospective planning permission cannot be granted the local authority has the power to remove the development. That decision applies regardless of whether the development was a kitchen extension or a Travellers' site.
	The ruling in the court cases in 2002 in Winchester and Wiltshire made it absolutely clear that the Human Rights Act did not confer a general right to a home anywhere. It conferred the right for respect for an existing home. The judgments made it very clear that enforcement action to interfere with that home had to be balanced against the effects of the action. In other words, the eviction of a Traveller from a site, perhaps because of trespass or planning law, could be a breach of human rights legislation if no other provision existed. But it need not be a breach if a suitable alternative exists.
	To suggest that the Human Rights Act needs to be revised or abolished is a misreading of the situation on a monumental scale. To suggest in a civilised country in the 21st century that there should be no legal force behind the right to a home or that there should be no Human Rights Act is shameful.
	A proposed solution lies not within the HRA but within planning legislation. The Local Government Association has suggested that it needs tougher powers to act against development that takes place without planning permission. We would have to be clear that that would apply regardless of whether the developer is a Traveller, a house owner or indeed a farmer. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, consistently talked about illegal activity, but it is very important to understand that it is not illegal to develop something without planning permission, but you have to seek planning permission after it has been done.
	All that leads us back to the issue of allocated sites. The solution lies in the ability of local authorities to use the planning system to allocate suitable sites. Without doubt the system should be part of the mainstream housing planning process, starting with an assessment of need, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Avebury, to planning suitable provision. As my noble friend Lady Miller pointed out, that needs to be done across local authority boundaries, otherwise the problems simply move to the authorities most aware of them, and pressure from electors would cause them to resile from them.
	Sites that are identified in that way could be located in environmentally suitable places of such location and size to ensure that the social and welfare needs of the Travelling community are met and reconciled with the needs of the settled population.
	I do not underestimate the difficulties of managing those allocations in a way that does not cause too much discomfort to the settled community, but it is surely a process that is better done in a managed way rather than the ad hoc confrontational system that is generated at present.
	The sites could be provided and paid for in a number of ways. They do not have to be some sort of handout. Travellers could pay a licence fee or rent for sites that they occupy, and the sites could be owned and managed by the local authorities, housing associations or, indeed by the travellers themselves. They often purchase land on which to live. We need a system in which the land purchased by Travellers is land allocated by the local authorities, and in keeping with general planning policy.
	When Travellers occupy land without permission, existing legislation enables them to be charged with trespass. I was horrified by the proposals of the Leader of the Conservatives that a special law of trespass, which he called the "Travellers' law" should be created. I can think of no other example of creating a criminal offence and then naming a group of people whom we expect to be guilty of it. That might not be racist but it is certainly discriminatory. It should be resisted at all costs.
	Work recently carried out by Cardiff University estimates that some £18 million a year is spent on evicting Travellers from illegal encampments. It argues that the money would be far better spent on establishing lawful sites.
	Travellers currently have infant mortality rates that are three times that of the rest of the population. Their life expectancy is 10 years less than that of the settled population. In allocated settled sites, rather than being constantly moved on, Travellers can better integrate with the local community and have the access to the education, welfare and heath care that they need.
	As we heard from my noble friend Lady Miller, it has not been impossible in the past to find an approach to those issues that better balances the rights of Travellers to lead the life that they have chosen, and the rights of the settled population to see that they have not been disadvantaged by the choices made by others.
	The pre-election activity of scapegoating particular sections of the community is not how to achieve a lasting solution. At worst, stoking up the fires of mistrust makes locally negotiated solutions far more difficult to come by, not just now but for many years in the future.

Baroness Hanham: My Lords, if the noble Lord will allow me, I shall address the situation on land in a moment. The new collective guidance recently issued by the Government effectively bans evictions on publicly owned land and gives a green light to travellers to set up illegal camps in parks, on open spaces and in fields owned by councils and other public bodies, thus creating something of a trespassers' charter. The regulations explain how trespassers and evictions should be handled, stating that forced evictions of illegal Traveller camps are banned if the land is publicly owned; that councils and the police cannot infringe any aspect of the Human Rights Act—we have heard quite a lot about that from the noble Lord, Lord Avebury; that welfare checks for travellers must take priority when dealing with illegal encampments; that the police and councils are to be sensitive to the different cultural perspectives of Travellers, with which I wholly agree; and that evictions cannot take place if travellers have a reasonable excuse, such as illness.
	The Government also claim that they have given new powers to councils to issue temporary stop notices to tackle breaches of planning controls. We had quite a number of exchanges about the value of temporary stop notices when we debated the Planning Bill. Stop notices cannot be used to remove a caravan if it is occupied by someone as their main residence. Stop notices do not prohibit the use of a building as a dwelling or the dumping of refuse and waste materials, and they apply for a maximum of only 28 days. After that the normal, ineffective planning laws recommence. The local planning authority may not issue a further temporary stop notice on the expiry of the original temporary notice.
	What must happen is that illegal Traveller encampments are stopped from being set up by giving power back to local communities and by ensuring that planning controls are fairly enforced. I liked the thoughts of my noble friend Lord Lucas on this, and I remind the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, that even when there was a requirement for all local authorities to provide land, it was far from the ideal solution. I recall that during the early 1990s, Travellers were parked all over the sides of the roads around Windsor and up towards London airport. The requirement did not prevent illegal encampments. Indeed, it was absurd because the requirement extended even to areas such as central London.
	We all recognise that there are travellers who will want to move around and that sites must be provided. There is nothing in any law or anyone's policies to say that those sites cannot, by agreement, be provided. That brings us to the point that my noble friend Lord Lucas raised: this can be carried out at a local level with local agreement. That is the way to do it, because that is how to prevent resentment when these things happen.
	This has been by and large a good-tempered debate. I am glad about that because this subject does not require people to raise the temperature. It requires a considered view of what is happening and what needs to be done. The link between housing and the housing needs of not only the whole community but also Travellers is extremely important. One cannot overcome the other by trying to go around the law in the way that we believe is happening at the moment. I again thank my noble friend Lord Howard for his considerable contribution to the debate.

Lord Bassam of Brighton: My Lords, the noble Baroness is right to remind us that debates in your Lordships' House are temperate and good-natured: and so they should be. They should be so on this issue too. I was going to pay tribute to all Members of your Lordships' House—including the noble Lord, Lord Howard, who made at least one or two points with which I had little difficulty in agreeing—who have contributed to the debate because by and large it has been good-tempered.
	I should hope that we would have a more measured approach, and one outside a potential general election campaign, to the issue of Travellers and the control of Travellers' sites because the subject is important enough to merit and deserve that. Because the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is in his place, I am reminded that we have had such debates in the past when looking at housing and planning issues. We have made considerable constructive progress.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, paid tribute to the LGA Conservative leadership and other Conservative Party members for their contribution. My wish is that that positive approach was more broadly spread. I will endeavour in the time allotted to me to answer as many questions as I can, but I want to set out some important policy elements from the Government on the two issues.
	As many noble Lords have observed, housing is now much higher up the national political agenda than for many years. It falls to all of us to work well together to ensure that everyone in society has a decent home. We must improve the choice and quality of available housing. We should work together to address the country's housing needs in a way that protects greenfield sites and promotes sustainable development and sustainable communities.
	When people walk out of their houses they also want to feel part of the wider community: a community that is cleaner, safer and greener; a community in which they can identify with those around them; and that gives them a sense of place, purpose and pride. The debate we need to have is how to help to provide the homes people need within sustainable communities, whether they are Traveller communities or settled communities.
	The Government are keen to make home ownership more widely available and to ensure that sufficient affordable housing is also available. We want to ensure that the planning system delivers the right housing in the right place and at the right time—an important issue on which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, touched. The Government are considering how we will respond in that context to the important recommendations of Kate Barker on the need to increase housing supply. In the mean time it is necessary to ensure that all current commitments to housing supply are honoured.
	To achieve sustainable communities we launched the sustainable communities plan in February 2003. More recently the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has published two new five-year plans. Sustainable Communities—Homes for All sets out the Government's programme to promote opportunity, choice, quality and fairness in housing across the country. Sustainable Communities—People, Places and Prosperity sets out plans to revitalise communities and strengthen the voice of neighbourhoods and local people in how services are delivered.
	The government guidance is clear about how authorities should plan for new homes. The guidance on planning for housing—PPG3—establishes that the first aim is for authorities to focus new development, wherever possible, on brownfield sites. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, in his one reference to building, tried to tell your Lordships' House that the Government were attempting to concrete over greenfield land. That is simply not the case.
	The Government are committed to protecting greenfield land by maintaining our target of at least 60 per cent of new housing development on brownfield sites. Development on brownfield land has risen from 56 per cent in 1997 to 67 per cent in 2003. In London some 90 per cent of all new development is on brownfield sites.
	The noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, raised some interesting questions around the issue of greenfield, brownfield and—as he constructed it—whitefield development. I want to make it clear that PPG3 says that sustainable greenfield development—the issue on which the noble Lord interestingly touched—is allowable and may be needed to meet agreed housing numbers particularly where brownfield opportunities are inappropriately located.
	PPG3 is clear that authorities should be developing policies in their plans to ensure that the most effective use is made of existing brownfield sites. Where it is appropriate there will of course have to be some greenfield development. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cobbold, about the nature of housing developments in rural communities was extremely important in that context.
	However, opportunities for new development should not be wasted with low-density schemes, as can happen. Not only will those not work towards building sustainable communities, but they will also exacerbate the need to release greenfield sites, something that none of us wants to see to excess. We are also doing well here: housing densities in England have risen from 25 to 33 dwellings per hectare since 1997 and in London average densities are around 53 dwellings per hectare.
	Good design can help to ensure that higher densities even improve and enhance an area and its environment. The Government have collected many good practice examples that show what can be done without compromising or damaging the character of an area. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, raised an interesting argument against regional spatial strategies and district plans. In making those points he missed the importance of having a regional structure within which local district plans can be made. He was focusing on strengthening the arm of the community: of course that is important, but it has to be seen in a wider context and against the background of wider need—something that the noble Lord has recognised in the past.
	For that reason we say that local authorities should work with their communities to develop a vision for their communities. They should explain the choices that they have in delivering the housing needs in their community. The new planning Act enhances the ability of local authorities to work with local communities to plan positively to ensure that the housing needs of the community and the other aspirations and needs they have for infrastructure improvement are met.
	It seems to me that the same people who often want to stop any greenfield development also do not want housing built at higher densities. But they cannot have it both ways unless they want us to stop all house building. This appears to be a politically motivated justification of nimbyism for the rural and sometimes suburban voter.
	I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, has particular fears about green belt policy, but I reject the assertion that we threaten green belts. The Government remain fully supportive of the green belt. Indeed, the policy remains unchanged from that of the previous Conservative administration pre-1997. There are no proposals to relax it. There remains a general presumption against inappropriate development in the green belt, and that presumption is as strong as ever.
	Indeed, our target is for each English region to maintain or increase the current area designated as green belt in local plans, including regions containing growth areas. In fact, between 1997 and 2003 the size of the green belt nationally increased by more than 19,000 hectares, with a further 12,000 hectares proposed in emerging plans.
	We now propose to strengthen the protection of the green belt. We will shortly be consulting on a new green belt direction which will ensure that certain proposals for development in the green belt will be referred to the Secretary of State. It will be the strongest ever green belt policy put forward by a government.
	I turn now to the other side of the discussions we have had during the debate—that is, the issue of Gypsies and Travellers. I am sure that most Members of your Lordships' House will agree that Gypsies and Travellers should enjoy the same rights as everyone else to establish a decent place to live as long as they do so within the law. We believe in an inclusive society where members of this community have the right to pursue a traditional nomadic lifestyle.
	The noble Lord, Lord Howard, paid tribute to those law-abiding members of the travelling community and referred to the law breakers as minority. We should hang on to those two very important comments. We want to make sure that Gypsies and Travellers have the same rights as others—not rights over and above others—particularly in regard to essential services, where they should have rights of access without fear or discrimination.
	There is growing evidence to suggest that Gypsies and Travellers are among the most vulnerable and marginalised ethnic and minority groups in the United Kingdom—a point picked up by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott. This is one of the reasons why the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is currently undertaking a Gypsy and Traveller policy review, and officials will be reporting to Ministers shortly.
	The review focuses on equality issues for the Gypsy and Traveller community and the mainstreaming of Gypsy and Traveller issues within wider local and national policy. It is looking at how to encourage more publicly provided and privately owned sites and how to overcome some of the unnecessary barriers that exist to site provision. We want the planning system to reflect the mainstreaming of Gypsy and Traveller accommodation within the wider social housing context and support changes that will lead to the improvement of the health of Gypsies and Travellers, who have the poorest health status of any black or minority ethnic group in England.
	As part of this wider policy review, we have also recently consulted on a new planning circular providing guidance on Gypsy and Traveller sites. While the Government recognise that some Gypsies and Travellers wish to embrace a nomadic lifestyle, we know that others prefer to live a more settled existence on local authority or private sites.
	It would be helpful to draw a distinction between unauthorised development and unauthorised encampment, an issue which was referred to on many occasions during the debate. An unauthorised encampment is one where the land is not owned by those setting up the encampment, and I will talk about that later. An unauthorised development is where a person or persons—be they Gypsies and Travellers or members of the settled community—purchase land and carry out development for which planning permission is required but where no such permission has been granted. This is considered a breach of planning control and amounts to unauthorised development. Local planning authorities have a huge range of enforcement powers to deal with unauthorised developments.
	I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Howard, will understand that I am unable to comment on specific planning cases. However, it would be useful to say some words about the Government's policy on Gypsy and Traveller sites and planning.
	Planning policies concerning the provision of suitable locations for Gypsy and Traveller sites, whether local authority provided or private, are currently set out in the Department of the Environment Circular 1/94—a circular which has had certain notoriety in the debate. The Government believe that the 1994 circular is not working effectively in many cases and in many areas to identify enough appropriate sites. Recent caravan counts have shown that there are around 3,500 caravans on unauthorised developments and encampments in England, with around one-third of these in the eastern region. There is a clear mismatch between need and planned permission.
	The new draft circular stresses the importance of local authorities undertaking a proper quantitative assessment of need and, through the new regional planning process, for that need to be met via proper spatial planning by identifying specific sites in local plans or setting achievable criteria that offer some certainty that planning permission will be granted.
	Unfortunately, as we know, Gypsies and Travellers often proceed to establish sites without first obtaining the necessary planning consent. In many cases the locations they choose are completely inappropriate in terms of land use. Enforcement action by local authorities against such unauthorised development is therefore common.
	The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, asked for figures on such unauthorised developments and enforcement. We do not collect those centrally.
	We need to recognise that the effect of circular 1/94 was that local authorities did not allocate land in plans and adopted criteria which were often unrealistic, making it very difficult for Gypsies and Travellers to identify appropriate sites.
	The Government expect the same standard of behaviour of Gypsies and Travellers as of the settled community, and we take the view that any anti-social behaviour should be dealt with in the same way. As to enforcement, anti-social behaviour orders can be used against Gypsies and Travellers with no fixed address. The forms for application, summons and so on can use the address where they are residing at the time or simply "no fixed address".
	Travellers and Gypsies, whatever type of site or encampment they are on, should take responsibility for their plots or the land next to them and keep them clean, not tip waste. They should dispose of waste properly and not cause nuisance to neighbours. Most do exactly that.
	Local authorities have a key role to play in identifying suitable locations for sites and working with Gypsies and Travellers to assist them to find land that they can purchase and develop. A few planning authorities have now adopted that best practice.
	As a leader of a local authority for some 13 years, I found this one of the most difficult and vexed issues to deal with. Quite frankly, while my authority adopted best practice, made some provision and managed to work in close partnership with one or two other local authorities that did the same, the majority of local authorities did not want to work closely together. Many were happy to play the game of pushing Gypsies and Travellers from pillar to post and to wash their hands of any need or responsibility to tackle and deal with some of the difficult issues which arose as a result of the travelling communities.
	It is for that reason that I believe that close co-operation between local authorities and Gypsies and Travellers is very much the best way forward. It can help to reduce instances where Gypsies and Travellers establish sites unlawfully, causing friction between Gypsies and Travellers and settled communities.
	In that context, it will be helpful perhaps to say something about the enforcement of planning control in general. The Government share the view that local planning authorities should take enforcement action if they consider that an unacceptable breach of planning control has occurred. I mentioned earlier that they have a range of tools at their disposal and I should like to outline exactly what these are.
	Under powers in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, as amended by the Planning and Compensation Act 1991, local planning authorities have wide-ranging enforcement powers to deal with breaches of planning control.
	First, they have the power to serve a planning contravention notice. This can be used where it appears that there may have been a breach of planning control and the local planning authority requires information about the activities on the land or to find out more about the nature of the recipient's interest in the land.
	Secondly, they have the power to issue an enforcement notice, requiring steps to be taken to remedy the breach within a given period. There is a right of appeal to the Secretary of State against enforcement notices. If the notice is upheld, failure to comply is an offence with a maximum penalty on conviction of £20,000.
	Thirdly, they have the power to serve a stop notice. This has the effect of immediately stopping any activity which contravenes planning control guidelines and where there are special reasons which justify doing this. If contravened, the resulting offence can be prosecuted in the magistrates' court with a maximum penalty on conviction of £20,000.
	Fourthly, they have the power to serve a breach of condition notice where there is a failure to comply with any condition or limitation imposed on a grant of planning permission. Fifthly, they have the ability to seek an injunction in the High Court or county court to restrain any actual or expected breach of planning control.
	Finally, there are improved powers of entry on to land for authorised officers of the local planning authority for them to obtain information required for enforcement purposes.
	In addition, in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 we introduced the temporary stop notice. That enables local planning authorities to take prompt action to stop unauthorised development immediately. It can be in force for up to 28 days. This will allow local planning authorities time to serve an enforcement notice to remedy the breach of planning control. Such notices can be used to prevent any new caravans coming to the site, even if those new caravans are the main dwellings of a Traveller or Gypsy. Where caravans are already on the site, temporary stop notices can require them to leave if their caravans are causing serious harm to the public interest—for example, if they are on a site of special scientific interest or on polluted land.
	Injunctive powers in the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 enable a local planning authority to enter and remove unauthorised development undertaken in breach of an enforcement notice.
	There are many measures open to planning authorities and many powers which the police can use in dealing with unauthorised encampments and unauthorised developments. I reject fundamentally the allegation that we have weakened the enforcement processes. In support of our case, the Association of Chief Police Officers and local authorities say that they are content with the powers necessary to deal with unauthorised encampment. So the Government have not been weak in ensuring that there is a proper regulatory and enforcement regime—far from it. We have taken steps to improve and strengthen it.
	The important thing to remember is the need for close working relationships and co-operation, particularly with regard to Gypsies and Travellers. In that direction lie solutions to some of the problems to which noble Lords have drawn attention during this debate. The sensible adoption of spatial plans and the recognition in local development plans of the importance of site provision and facilities are ways in which we can improve the conditions for Gypsies and Travellers and reduce the tensions which exist in some communities on the urban fringe and in rural areas.
	No one is saying that there is not a problem. We have understood the nature of the problem and want to see a practical and sensible recognition of it, with practical and sensible steps taken, rather than a hysterical debate. It is not enough to consign Gypsies and Travellers to a state of limbo. It is all very well for Michael Howard to have a seven-point plan, but he needs an eighth point. All seven points are about enforcement and raising the debate about the Human Rights Act. There is no eighth point to his plan. What is the solution to dealing with the issues and problems that his own action in government led to and created in the past? We want a practical and sensible resolution to some of those difficulties. By co-operation, working together and understanding the nature of the difficulty, I think we can do that. I hope that that co-operation will lead to the ending of some of the difficulties which some noble Lords have raised in today's important debate.

Baroness Noakes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill. He will note that we are an even more select band of Treasury Peers than normal. It is tempting to suggest that we decamp to the Bishops' Bar rather than continue with the debate, but perhaps we should do our duty.
	As noble Lords will be aware, your Lordships' House likes nothing better than an opportunity to scrutinise complex legislation, but with this Bill we are entitled to heave a great sigh of relief that we will not be expected to apply our skills to it.
	With the exception of some minor instances which have been identified, the Bill does not change the existing law, as the Minister has said, and we have no problem with the changes that have been made. The Bill contains an extensive power for the Treasury to rewrite legislation, but in another place the Government gave a clear commitment that that power would be used only with the agreement of the Tax Law Rewrite Project Steering Committee, and we are entirely content with that.
	There has been ample consultation, and the Minister read out some of the responses. If we allow for the rather stuffy language that such bodies use, we might take the response as ecstatic. We must applaud that.
	The Minister has also rightly paid tribute to those who have been involved in this project to date, in particular my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke and my noble and learned friend Lord Howe of Aberavon. I am proud of the enormous contribution that those former Chancellors from my party have made to the project. However, I join the Minister in paying tribute to all those who have worked hard on this project to date.
	The Bill runs to three volumes, and it even has three volumes of Explanatory Notes. We need more than 700 pages of densely packed text just to set out our charging system for trading and other income. When the whole of income and corporation tax was consolidated in 1988, it needed fewer clauses than this Bill, although I concede it did have a few more schedules.
	It should also be noted that the Bill does not include some important aspects—notably, the anti-avoidance provisions of Part 17 of the Income and Corporation Taxes Act 1970. Those have to be added to get a sense of how much law is still required for trading and other income.
	The Bill may well have achieved its purpose of rewriting in a comprehensible form the income tax law for trading, and so on. The result, however, is daunting, and we have a legal patchwork, with some legislation still in the old style. The precedent of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 is not encouraging, because large parts of that were superseded almost immediately by the Finance Act 2003, which was written in an incompatible style. That raises the question of how the Government will ensure that parliamentary counsel embraces the new way of doing things. How can the rewrite philosophy get itself embedded into ongoing tax legislation? I would be interested to hear the Minister's views on that.
	We believe that the Tax Law Rewrite Project is a worthy one. It has taken longer than originally envisaged, although in no sense do I lay the blame for this on the Inland Revenue or on the Steering Committee. This Bill, along with its predecessor in 2003, demonstrates the enormity of the task.
	It was never the intention of the rewrite project to achieve simplification of the tax system, but what it has demonstrated is that simplification has to rise up the agenda. A quick glance at the Bill will reveal that the taxation of trading income is by no means simple. Over the years there has been a tweaking of the rules here and there for particular purposes, and the end result lacks real logic. The taxation of property income included in this Bill is particularly complex, with myriad rules covering leases, surrenders, holiday lets, wayleaves, special rules for eco-friendly deductions and many other things. The rewrite project has rewritten the law in a more comprehensible form, but the underlying substance remains very complex.
	My noble and learned friend Lord Howe gave the Hardman lecture on simplification of tax a few years ago. I had not expected him to be with us this evening, because he did not have his name down on the list, so I have stolen a bit of his speech from 2000, which I am going to continue to keep. He started his speech with the arresting thought that if taxes had existed in the Garden of Eden, the serpent would not have needed an apple; the prize of a simpler tax system alone would have seduced Eve.
	My noble and learned friend's proposition was for a two-pronged approach to operate alongside the rewrite process. In the fullness of time, simplification and rewrite would converge, but they would have to be run separately initially. The two prongs were a reduction in the volume of new tax legislation, plus a project similar to the rewrite project to tackle simplification on a systematic and detailed basis. If we were to look seriously at simplification, we would have to look very closely at the use of fiscal incentives, which are usually accompanied by a very large quantity of anti-avoidance legislation and hence become a great source of complexity. Many would of course argue that fiscal incentives are not themselves conducive to economic efficiency. Weaning Chancellors off the drug of fiscal incentives may be something of a challenge, I concede.
	Simplification would also require us to look again at the role of accounts as the tax base. They are currently the starting point, but then the complexity is layered on top. We may have to look again at purposive legislation, something that successive Chancellors have shied away from as a tool for dealing with avoidance. None of that is easy.
	I believe that we are still waiting for a sight of the Finance Bill, which last week's Budget spawned. One hopes that it will be shorter than last year's mammoth 634-page Act, but we fully expect a large number of complex clauses, including pages of new anti-avoidance legislation. We fully expect the process of complexity to continue. Do not the Government think that it is now time to pause?
	I do not believe that many ordinary taxpayers have any idea of the rules that apply to them. The Tolley's tax handbooks, one of the best known manuals, used to be compact and briefcase-friendly. The latest set runs to 11,000 pages. That means that in practice armies of accountants and lawyers have to exist to guide taxpayers through the system. As a former accountant in public practice, it will doubtless seem disloyal if I say that I do not regard that as economically useful activity. So does the Minister agree that we now need a fresh approach with simplification as the goal?
	None of that is to take away from our support from the rewrite project overall and this Bill in particular. I repeat our thanks to all those who have laboured to date and add our prospective thanks to those who will continue to labour to complete the task.

Lord McIntosh of Haringey: My Lords, I am grateful for the responses of both Front Benches to these amending regulations and orders—for what they are, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, says. I acknowledge that they are very much at the margin of issues that are the responsibility of the Financial Services Authority and that you could certainly go a lot further than this amending legislation does in many aspects of the authority's work.
	I am interested and somewhat reassured by the difference in the views between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democratic Party. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, is leading us towards a more fundamental review—what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, calls a root and branch review—of the Financial Services Authority, and indeed of FiSMA itself.
	As one who played a lengthy part in the passage of the Financial Services and Markets Act through the House five years ago, I would certainly resist any attempt to revive primary legislation. I hope that the noble Baroness was not suggesting that. I think that she was talking about something less than primary legislation.
	I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Newby, that if we can avoid a fundamental root and branch review, which would bring into question a wide range of the FSA's activities, it would be desirable to do so. The FSA has been in operation for significantly less than five years, and now is not the time for a fundamental review.
	The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, referred to the issue of the qualifications of pension fund trustees, and asked whether action was being taken. I referred briefly in my opening statement to the Pensions Act 2004, which happily she and I were not involved with. My noble friend Lady Hollis, who was involved, is in her place. She will confirm that a considerable and important part of the Pensions Act 2004 is concerned with the qualifications of pension fund trustees. The noble Baroness and I ought to inform ourselves more about that.
	I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said about proportionality. He questioned whether it was right to consult on what the City generally thought about proportionality rather than set out a standard of proportionality ourselves. I thought that that was what consultation was for. Proportionality could be such an inchoate concept that it was right for us to consult. I am grateful to those who responded to the consultation.
	I understand that we have general support for the detail of the regulations, and I commend them to the House.

Baroness Noakes: My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these rather complex orders. In particular, I thank her for using the shorter version of her speech.
	The regulations are only a part of the rather complex schemes of appeals for child trust funds. The Child Trust Fund Bill itself was considerably shorter than these regulations. It is indicative of the way in which we now have apparently modest legislation followed by great rafts of regulations.
	The Explanatory Notes refer to other orders which are required to complete the picture for these appeals—namely, some non-tax appeals regulations to be issued by the Treasury and two sets of regulations for child trust fund tax appeals. I have not seen those draft regulations and I wonder whether the Minister will explain the status of them. I am assuming—although I have not checked—that those regulations are subject only to the negative resolution procedure. If that is correct, I shall merely remark that it is rather unsatisfactory that we should not get the opportunity to debate together the whole picture of child trust fund appeals.
	In addition, I understand that the scheme of appeals is to be only temporary until a new system of tax tribunals has been set up. Can the Minister say when this will take place and what steps are required to reach that position? Is there a settled policy on this? What is holding-up the tax tribunals and therefore requiring this two-stage process for child trust fund appeals in an area which is already rather complex?
	When the Minister responds, will she explain the difference between a tax appeal and a non-tax appeal. What kind of appeals are we talking about in each case? Will they involve individuals or will they involve the providers of CTFs?
	Will she also say something about the number of appeals of each variety that are expected to be made each year? The Explanatory Notes are silent on anything practical about the impact of these regulations. Rather illogically, they append the regulatory impact assessment for the child trust fund scheme itself. Will the Minister say something about the costs that will fall on public funds for the appeals schemes for CTFs and what kinds of costs an individual will have to bear if he wishes to go through the appeals process?
	I am well aware that child trust funds are not within the Minister's responsibilities, but it is difficult to let the opportunity go past without saying a little about child trust funds and their development since the Act that was passed last year. The Minister will probably be aware that we have always regarded the child trust fund project as a gigantic and expensive electoral gimmick which will do little to reverse the disastrous slump in the savings ratio which has occurred since 1997.
	I do not know whether the Minister is aware of the survey published today by the Association of Investment Trust Companies. There is some good news for the Government in that 76 per cent of eligible parents are aware of the election gimmick. However, the Minister should also be aware that 17 per cent of parents of children who are ineligible think that they, too, will be receiving vouchers. So there might be rather a lot of disappointed voters around.
	The most interesting aspect of the survey was that most parents intend to put the money into a bank or building society and that fewer than 10 per cent will invest in the stock market. The Government have consistently said that they expect stock market-based products to be used to gain higher returns. They went to great lengths in the Act to ensure that stakeholder products were the centrepiece of the policy. The Government have clearly failed thus far. What plans, if any, do they have to turn this around, or will they simply be content that the Chancellor's millions of pounds of giveaway will be sitting in deposit accounts?

Baroness Hollis of Heigham: My Lords, I am grateful for the response of the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. These are, as they suspected, technical amendments, and they are benign. As for reopening questions about the child trust fund, I do not particularly want to involve issues of policy.
	On the status of the non-tax orders, the noble Baroness is exactly right: they are subject to the negative procedure. The more substantive question was that of the structure of the new appeals system. I may have misunderstood what the noble Baroness was seeking to find out, but let me try to describe what is happening at the moment.
	The current jurisdictions and structures for the general and special commissioners are set out in primary legislation. Therefore, the reform of the tax tribunals can take place only after further primary legislation.
	As a result of the Queen's Speech, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which administers the system, has permission to draft a courts and tribunals Bill. Under current plans, the new tribunal service, with the existing tribunals that currently come under the DCA or the Lord Chancellor's Department, will be operational from April 2006, while implementation of planned reforms under the proposed Bill, including any relating to the tax tribunals, and the bringing over of other appeals tribunals, will happen through the Leggatt process over the next two years. It is a perfectly sensible incremental strategy that we are starting with the existing tribunals under what was the Lord Chancellor's Department, and bringing over those that are under the Department for Work and Pensions. The DWP has the bulk of appeals tribunals, because it has all the social security appeals.
	The noble Baroness asked me what numbers we were talking about. This might be of interest to her. I was doing a quick count, and there are approximately 300,000 appeals a year, excluding employment tribunals. Of these, nearly 200,000 are associated with the DWP, and many of those are disability benefits, and so on. We expect the child trust fund appeals to be of the order of maybe 100 a year. That is why there is no regulatory impact assessment, except to say that the cost is negligible.
	What is interesting, and we do not yet know the answer, is whether the 100 is a correct figure and what it may be based on. I assume that, apart from difficult issues such as those associated with the death of a child, where there is some contest, a likely situation is where the child trust fund follows the child benefit, and there is a dispute between two parents who may have separated and, both having claims to child benefit, both then lay claim to the child trust fund.
	Vouchers, which can be drawn down on to the different forms of providers, whether building societies, banks, stakeholder funds or whatever, have been in place since January. That is only two months, but, so far, there been no suggestion of a single appeal, or to whom it should go, so 100 may be an overestimate.
	Finally, the noble Baroness made some broader points about supporting the increase in savings and the collapse of the savings ratio in this country. I am sorry, but I did some work on this—I suspect this might of interest to the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott—and the countries among the G8 with the highest savings ratios at the moment, running between 10 and 11 per cent, are Germany and Italy, and they have the lowest wealth and income per head of around $40,000, as indicated by GDP. The UK has a savings ratio of around 5.6 per cent and a wealth income of around $46,000 to $48,000 per head. GDP per individual is the only one we have. The US has a savings ratio of 1.5 per cent and a wealth per head of $55,000.
	That shows that the savings ratio is no reliable indicator of the wealth per head of the country. More, given that the savings ratio does not include housing wealth, and that it is simply the difference between the denominator and the numerator of pensions—the difference between savings paid in for pensions and pensions taken out—it does not indicate anything except rainy-day contingency funds. I am sure I have told the noble Baroness nothing she does not already know, and I wish the Benches opposite would get off this savings ratio hook, as if it indicates something profound about what is happening in this country.
	Having said that, the Government have done well in redistributing income, in the sense of bringing the poorest up. When we came into office, a child on income support would have had from the current Government an income through income support of just under £17 a week. Had that been RPI'd in today's terms, it would be worth about £23 a week. It is actually now more than £50 a week and has more than doubled in real terms. So we have made a significant contribution to attacking child poverty as reflected in income. However, there are real problems in the distribution of wealth and this, though only a modest gesture, goes some way towards meeting those problems.
	More than a quarter, or 28 per cent, of UK households, have no savings at all. Of households earning less than £300 a week, more than 40 per cent have no savings at all. If to that £250, or £500 if the child is on an income-related benefit, the parents were able to put away the child benefit for that child—it is probably not likely in most cases, but let us imagine that they could—that child at 18 would have a fund, whether in cash or equities, depending on the assumptions you make of growth, of something between £20,000 and £25,000. That is a substantial sum. And that is without the addition of possible additions at seven and, perhaps, possible additions at secondary age.
	In the same way as we are trying to ensure that the poorest children have seen a real increase in their income, so we are trying to ensure that the poorer children also go into adulthood with a modest capital endowment from the Government on behalf of us all. If the parents and any other members of the family are able to contribute, there will be a more substantial one, which will free those children to make the sort of choices—to go to university and so on—which children from more affluent households can more or less take for granted.
	Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, made a point with which I am entirely sympathetic, which is to use national savings as a vehicle. I believe that that vehicle has great trust in the country, and I should like it to come in a variety of forms—in pensions for women, through to the child trust fund. I shall try to find out whether we expect national savings to be a player. But one possibility for stakeholder funds, with their 1.5 per cent cap, that may go some way to meeting a concern that I share, is that there may be a degree of lifestyling, if I can use that phrase. When the child is 14 or 15 years old, you could move the money out of equities into a safer bond, gilt or cash-linked account, so that there is no possibility of a plunge in its value before the child is able to draw down that money at 18 for university, college or whatever else seems appropriate.
	I hope that I have answered the questions and that I have had a swipe at the false play on the savings ratio figures. I do not doubt that if I have not persuaded the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on that point, we shall revisit it in future.